Heterogeneous Megamodel Slicing for Model Evolution

Slicing is a widely used technique for supporting comprehension and assessing change impact during software evolution activities. While there has been substantial research into the slicing of particular model types, model-based software development typically involves heterogeneous collections of related models and there is little work addressing slicing in this context. In this paper, we propose a generic slicing approach for“megamodels”– a well-known model management technique for representing and manipulating collections of models and relationships between them. Our approach exploits existing model slicers for particular model types as well as the traceability relationships between models to address the broader heterogeneous model slicing problem. We illustrate our approach on an example of evolution in modelbased automotive software development.