Associations in MDE: A Concern-Oriented, Reusable Solution

Associations play an important role in model-driven software development. This paper describes a framework that uses Concern-Oriented Reuse CORE to capture many different kinds of associations, their properties, behaviour, and various implementation solutions within a reusable artifact: the Association concern. The concern exploits aspect-oriented modelling techniques to modularize the structure and behaviour required for enforcing uniqueness, multiplicity constraints and referential integrity for bidirectional associations. Furthermore, it packages different collection implementation classes that can be used to realize associations. For each implementation class, the impact of its use on non-functional qualities, e.g., memory consumption and performance, has been determined experimentally and formalized. We show how the class diagram notation, i.e., its metamodel and visual representation, can be extended to support reusing the Association concern, and present enhancements to automate feature selection and customization mappings to maximally streamline the reuse process in modelling tools.