A semi-formal description of migrating domain-specific models with evolving domains

One of the main advantages of defining a domain-specific modeling language (DSML) is the flexibility to adjust the language definition to changing requirements or in response to a deeper understanding of the domain. With the industrial applications of domain-specific modeling environments, models are valuable investments. If the modeling language evolves, these models must be seamlessly migrated to the evolved DSML. Although the changes stemming from the language evolution are not abrupt in nature, migrating existing models to a new language is still a challenging task. Our solution is the Model Change Language (MCL) tool set, which defines a DSML to describe the migration rules and then performs the model migration automatically. In this paper, we describe the precise semantics of MCL and its execution, along with the confluence of the migration.