Automatically Searching for Metamodel Well-Formedness Rules in Examples and Counter-Examples

Current metamodeling formalisms support the definition of a metamodel with two views: classes and relations, that form the core of the metamodel, and well-formedness rules, that constraints the set of valid models. While a safe application of automatic operations on models requires a precise definition of the domain using the two views, most metamodels currently present in repositories have only the first one part. In this paper, we propose to start from valid and invalid model examples in order to automatically retrieve well-formedness rules in OCL using Genetic Programming. The approach is evaluated on metamodels for state machines and features diagrams. The experiments aim at demonstrating the feasibility of the approach and at illustrating some important design decisions that must be considered when using this technique.