Towards a generic architecture for multi-level modeling

This paper presents the architecture of a model-driven engineering framework which relies on the unified notion of classes and objects, as pioneered by SELF. We implemented this architecture for the domain of testbed automation systems and argue that this architecture can be generalized. We outline why our first prototype implementation following a conventional, UML-like metamodeling approach failed and how the follow-up implementation is aligned with the more appropriate so-called orthogonal classification architecture (OCA). While the OCA has been thoroughly studied theoretically, we applied OCA for a real-world case in the automation system domain. We demonstrate that this modeling approach is feasible and implies a straightforward, clear-cut decomposition of the framework into implementation modules, leading to comprehensible software architectures.