Leveraging Family Polymorphism in MDE

While Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) are increasingly used in industry, both their definition and tooling (e.g., checkers, document or code generators, model transformations) still require significant development efforts that must be balanced with their limited number of users (by definition). Unfortunately, the current Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) technologies strongly rely on the conformance relation that bind a model to the unique DSML used to create it. Consequently, while most of the tools would be reusable for a family of close DSMLs, in practice it is not possible. In this paper, we propose to abstract the overly restrictive conformance relation with a typing relation allowing to manipulate a model through different DSMLs and uncover the need for model-oriented type systems. We introduce K3SLE a new modeling framework built on top of the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) that leverages family polymorphism to support the typing relation. Based on the typing relation, it natively provides model polymorphism, language inheritance and DSML evolution and interoperability. We demonstrate its use on representative use cases.

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Source https://inria.hal.science/hal-00994541
Author Degueule, Thomas, Combemale, Benoit, Barais, Olivier, Blouin, Arnaud, Jézéquel, Jean-Marc
Maintainer CCSD
Last Updated May 5, 2026, 10:35 (UTC)
Created May 5, 2026, 10:35 (UTC)
Identifier hal-00994541
Language en
Rights https://about.hal.science/hal-authorisation-v1/
contributor Reliable and efficient component based software engineering (TRISKELL) ; Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Systèmes Aléatoires (IRISA) ; Université de Rennes (UR)-Institut National des Sciences Appliquées - Rennes (INSA Rennes) ; Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA)-Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université de Rennes (UR)-Institut National des Sciences Appliquées - Rennes (INSA Rennes) ; Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA)-Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Centre Inria de l'Université de Rennes ; Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)
creator Degueule, Thomas
date 2014-05-21T00:00:00
harvest_object_id 99727abf-a72f-4fc5-9405-19b149ddb45e
harvest_source_id 3374d638-d20b-4672-ba96-a23232d55657
harvest_source_title test moissonnage SELUNE
metadata_modified 2026-02-07T00:00:00
set_spec type:UNDEFINED