A study of behavioral and structural composition methods and techniques

In Software Engineering as in all other engineering fields, the product to be build is divided into sub-parts that are independently constructed and subsequently assembled. This procedure reduces the complexity and improves the reuse of the developed products. MDE (Model Driven Engineering) is a recent software engineering discipline that focuses this approach. It has allowed several significant improvements in the development of complex software systems by providing the means that enable to switch from one abstraction level into another or from one modeling space into another. However, models management may be tedious and costly. Thus, it is necessary to provide some flexible and reliable tools for automatic management of models and some techniques for their transformations in order to live up to user expectations. In this context, model composition has become an important artifact in the MDE domain that allows constructing and composing an efficient assembly process. In this paper, we present the state of the art of recent works in the model composition methods and techniques by focusing on the various parameters that govern and characterize their behavior.