A Formal Framework for Incremental Model Slicing

Abstract

We report about a recently developed “Formal Framework for Incremental Model Slicing”, published in [Ta18]. A model slice of a model is a submodel comprising a selected model part, called slicing criterion. In addition to classical use cases from the field of program understanding, model slicing is also motivated by specifying submodels of interest to be further processed more efficiently. Since slicing criteria are often modified during software development tasks, such slices often need to be updated. A slice update can be performed by creating the new slice from scratch or by incrementally updating the existing slice. We present a formal framework for defining model slicers that support incremental slice updates. This framework abstracts from the behavior of concrete slicers as well as from the concrete model modification approach. Incremental slice updates are shown to be equivalent to non-incremental ones. Furthermore, we present a framework instantiation based on the concept of edit scripts defining application sequences of model transformation rules, along with two two concrete model slicers implemented based on this instantiation.