Formal and Tool Support for Model Driven Engineering with Maude

Models and metamodels play a cornerstone role in Model-Driven Software Development. Although several notations have been proposed to specify them, the kind of formal and tool support they provide is quite limited. In this paper we explore the use of Maude as a formal notation for describing models and metamodels. Maude is an executable rewriting logic language specially well suited for the specification of object-oriented open and distributed systems. We show how Maude offers a simple, natural, and accurate way of specifying models and metamodels, and offers good tool support for reasoning about them. In particular, we show how some basic operations on models, such as model subtyping, type inference, and metric evaluation, can be easily specified and implemented in Maude, and made available in development environments such as Eclipse.