CRI: A Repository for Model Driven Development

Michigan State University, East Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

This collaborative project, planning the creation of a community resource that contains both information about model-based development and tools to support its research, provides infrastructure that will improve the use of model-based languages. The work aims at enabling research on model driven development practices and providing reference for developing tools. (Model-based approaches rely on non-code artifacts that have precise semantics, such as specification languages, UML-like modeling languages, etc.) The project utilizes specifications at various levels of abstraction and from a variety of perspectives, which are then transformed into executable systems. The approach consists on developing a community resource that provides a single point of access to shared artifacts reflecting high-quality Model Driven Development (MDD) experience and knowledge about industry and academia. The repository will collect artifacts from both industry and academia, as well as from open source projects, and contain semantic relationships that could be mined by various tools. Model driven development can be seen as an effort to increase programming productivity and other quality measures by building very high level programming languages. The plans for the repository involve a significant amount of software infrastructure. The design, based on the concept of artifact, artifact relationship, and artifact cluster, permits building complex artifacts from smaller ones using relationships, and viewing these in various ways using clusters. Broader Impact: Helping the standardization efforts across the spectrum of software development research and practices, the work contributes to research and teaching by improving communication and providing examples. The project contains a plan for interaction with industry that could broaden the influence of the research. Moreover, it also leverages existing relationships with predominantly minority-serving institutions.