| Model integrated computing (MIC) is an effective and efficient method for developing, maintaining, and evolving large-scale, domain-specific software applications. Application programs are synthesized from models created using customized, domain-specific model integrated program synthesis (MIPS) environments. The MultiGraph Architecture (MGA), under development at Vanderbilt University's Institute for Software Integrated Systems, is a toolset for creating such MIPS environments.; Until now, these environments have been hand-crafted specifically for each domain. Because common modeling concepts appear in many, if not all, MGA-based MIPS systems, research suggests it is possible to “model the modeling environment” by creating a metamodel—a model that describes a particular domain-specific MIPS environment (DSME). By modeling the syntactic, semantic, and presentation requirements of a DSME, the metamodel can be used to synthesize the DSME itself, enabling design environment evolution in the face of changing domain requirements. Because both the domain-specific applications and the DSME are designed to evolve, efficient and safe large-scale computer-based systems development is possible over the entire lifetime of the system.; This dissertation reviews current metamodeling languages and techniques, examines available DSME resources, develops methods to represent syntactic and semantic modeling language requirements using UML object diagrams and MultiGraph constraint language expressions, and discusses automatic transformation of metamodel specifications into DSMEs. Case studies are used to demonstrate metamodel specification, creation, and translation. |
