Composition operators for modeling languages: A literature review

Abstract

Efficiently engineering modeling languages demands their reuse through composition. Research in language engineering has produced many different operators to reuse and compose languages and language parts. Unfortunately, these operate on different dimensions of languages, produce diverse results, and are distributed across various technological spaces and publications, which hampers understanding the state of language composition for researchers and practitioners. To mitigate this, we report the results of a literature review on modeling language composition operators. In this review, we identify operators, their properties, and supported language dimensions, and relate them to categories of language composition. Through this, our survey draws a new, detailed map of modeling language composition operators that can guide researchers in software language engineering in identifying uncharted territory and practitioners in employing the most suitable composition operators.