A Distributed Approach for the Co-Evolution of Metamodels and Models

SyncMeta is a meta-modeling framework that was developed at i5 to allow collaborative creation of metamodels and corresponding models in the Web browser. In this framework, a concrete model editor can be generated at any time from the meta-model editor. However whenever the metamodel evolves, these changes are not reflected in the model instances. That is, the meta-models and models do not co-evolve.

This thesis targets to achieve a framework for keeping both meta-model and model instances up to date, during concurrent near real-time editing. The literature on conceptual modeling and model-driven engineering offers different solution approaches to this problem. The aim of this bachelor thesis is to define and implement a suitable co-evolution strategy in SyncMeta. This will require to introduce a versioning/concurrent editing mechanism in the metamodel editor. The model editor should then offer an option to automatically reflect the changes between two versions of the metamodel in any affected instance of this metamodel.

The thesis requires excellent knowledge of Javascript.