Context: Model comparison plays a central role in many software engineering activities. However, a comprehensive understanding about the state-of-art is still required. Goal: This paper, therefore, aims at classifying, identifying publication fora, and performing thematic analysis of the current literature in model comparison for creating an extensive and detailed understanding about this area, thereby determining [...]
Multi-agent systems (MAS) involve a wide variety of agents that interact with each other to achieve their goals. Usually each agent has a particular internal architecture defining its main structure that gives support to the interaction among the entities of MAS. Many modelling languages have been proposed in recent years to represent the internal architectures [...]
The lack of empirical knowledge about the effects of model composi-tion techniques on developers' effort is the key impairment for their widespread adoption in practice. This problem applies to both existing categories of model composition techniques, i.e. specification-based (e.g. Epsilon) and heuristic-based (e.g. IBM RSA) techniques. This paper reports on a controlled experiment that investigates [...]
Model composition plays a central role in many software engineering activities, e.g., evolving design models to add new features. To support these activities, developers usually rely on model composition heuristics. The problem is that the models to-be-composed usually conflict with each other in several ways and such composition heuristics might be unable to properly deal [...]