Towards flexible, incremental, and paradigm-agnostic consistency checking in multi-level modeling environments

Multi-level modeling has become a popular paradigm as it allows for a natural and easy-to-understand representation of various real-word hierarchies. To date, several approaches have been proposed on how multi-level models should be represented and constructed – however, their continuous evolution and consistency has received considerably less attention. Consistency checking is critical to efficient and effective modeling—especially to understand the impact of model changes. Multi-level modeling adds another dimension because it allows for both model and metamodel changes over multiple levels. This paper discusses the key challenges for consistency checking in multi-level modeling environments and outlines an incremental and highly flexible approach for addressing these challenges effectively without being limited to a specific modeling paradigm. A prototype implementation of the approach has been developed; preliminary evaluation results suggest that the approach scales and provides instant consistency information during multilevel modeling.