Towards Synchronizing Models with Evolving Metamodels

Metamodel evolution poses a threat to the applicability of Model-Driven Development to large scale projects. The problem is caused by incompatibilities between metamodel revisions. These render models that conform to the older version of the metamodel non-conformant to the newer version. An approach to addressing this problem is co-evolution of models with their respective metamodels. In this paper we introduce the problem of synchronizing models with evolving metamodels and outline an approach to addressing it efficiently. The aim of the proposed approach is to minimize the effort required to perform model migration in face of metamodel changes. To provide deeper insights into the envisioned approach, we demonstrate preliminary solutions to the problem of change detection between two metamodel revisions. Furthermore, we present an approach to model-to-model transformations, using a conservative copying algorithm, which regulates the retainment of instances during model migration.