Model Intelligence : an Approach to Modeling Guidance

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) facilitates building solutions in many enterprise application domains through its use of domain-specific abstractions and constraints. An important attribute of MDE approaches is their ability to check a solution for domain-specific requirements, such as security constraints, that are hard to evaluate using traditional source-code focused development efforts. The challenge in many enterprise domains, however, is finding a legitimate solution, not merely checking solution correctness. For these domains, model intelligence that uses domain constraints to guide modelers is needed. This paper shows how existing constraint specification and checking practices, such as the Object Constraint Language, can be adapted and leveraged to guide users towards correct solutions using visual cues.