Reifying Concurrency for Executable Metamodeling

Current metamodeling techniques can be used to specify the syntax and semantics of domain specific modeling languages (DSMLs). Still, there is little support for explicitly specifying concurrency semantics of DSMLs. Often, such semantics are provided by the implicit concurrency model of the execution environment supported by the language workbench used to implement the DSMLs. The lack of an explicit concurrency model has several drawbacks: it prevents from developing a complete understanding of the DSML’s behavioral semantics, as well as effective concurrency-aware analysis techniques, and explicit models of semantic variants. This work reifies concurrency as a metamodeling facility, leveraging formalization work from the concurrency theory and models of computation (MoC) community. The essential contribution of this paper is a language workbench for binding domain-specific concepts and models of computation through an explicit event structure at the metamodel level. We present a case study that serves to demonstrate the utility of the novel metamodeling facilities and clarify the scope of the approach.