Model composition is a very important modeling task as it allows to combine various perspectives of a system (represented by various models) into a single specialized view (a composed model). Several approaches have been proposed to tackle this problem, but they present some important limitations concerning efficiency, interoperability, and/or synchronization issues (mainly due to the element cloning mechanism used to create the composed model). In this paper we propose a new model composition method based on the virtualization of the composition mechanism. In our approach, the composed model is in fact created as a virtual model that redirects all its model access and manipulation requests directly to the set of base models from which it was generated. This is done transparently for the designer. Our mechanism improves the composition process with relation to the limitations mentioned above. The solution has been implemented and validated in a prototype tool on top of EMF.
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