Dynamic Models – The MetaMorph Formalism and Model-Operations

Models unfolding their full power are not static but dynamic, interactive artifacts. Mature modeling methods offer means to operationalize models, amplifying their value beyond mere visualizations. Nevertheless, operations on models are regularly not an integral part of the language specification, even less an object of formalization. In this approach, we demonstrate how to capture the core concepts of operations on models in our formalism MetaMorph to allow for an extension of the formal definition of a language’s syntax with a precise but platform-independent specification of language functionality. We understand as a model a series of model states that flow into one another through the interaction of the modeler and provided operations. Thereby, we distinguish structural events for the basic changes and domain events for the semantic-aware operations on models, as well as model operations in the creation phase and the operationalization phase of a model. To examine our considerations on an example, we employ ProVis, a modeling method for stochastic education.