Co-Evolving Meta-Models and View Types in View-Based Development

View-based development is a successful approach for the development of complex cyber-physical systems. It uses views to abstract from the complexity of the system and allows the developers to focus on exactly the necessary information for a certain task. With projective views, the information shown is derived from underlying models, and changes made to the views are reflected back to the models. Similar to how models conform to a meta-model, views conform to a view type, which describes what and how the information is presented. When the underlying meta-models need to evolve, e.g., due to new requirements, so do the view types that rely on them. In this work, we investigate how to assist the meta-model/view-type co-evolution process by providing suggestions for adapting a view type after a meta-model change. To this end, we provide an approach and conceptual model for such co-evolution, based on precisely describing what a suggestion is. We present a catalog of domain-independent suggestions for the most representative meta-model evolution steps. We believe such suggestions can provide significant assistance in the maintenance and management of the meta-model/view type co-evolution.