SmartModels – An MDE Platform for the Management of Software Product Lines

In software engineering everything evolves very fast: user requirements, technologies, methodologies and applications. Can we foresight and strengthen our approaches to build software to confront these more and more complex challenges? While there are key issues to solve, it is also noteworthy to know that we are very close to exciting innovations. Software Product Lines (SPL) — modeling technology together with source-code generative tools seem to make it easier to manage diverse environments with complex, constantly changing relationships. In the context of SPL, this paper presents an approach — SmartModels [1] [2], validated by a prototype — SmartFactory. It reviews the state-of-the-art of SmartModels briefly introducing its principles, basic entities and main elements when defining a business-model. It also addresses the Meta-Object Protocol (MOP) which lays the foundation of SmartModels’ mechanism to fill the gap between the semantics and the reification of a model entity.