Formalizing Models and Meta-models for System Development

Meta-model based development offers a promising way of managing the complexity of industrial scale software development by describing a system in terms of different ‘views’. These views can then be described as instances of a single meta-model. Such views are usually not disjoint and it is essential that they are shown to be consistent. A weakness of meta-modelling tools is the lack of support for describing the behaviour of models, and this is central to demonstrating the consistency of views. We address this problem by combining meta-modelling with formal techniques for stating and verifying behavioural properties. In this paper, we describe a formalization of models and meta-models and show how this leads to automated procedures for consistency checking between views in an industrial software development framework.