Ken Vanherpen: Design-Space Exploration using Alloy




In the growing world of MDE many tools are offered to meta-model (a part of) a system, constrain it, and create instances of the meta-model. Those tools can be used to describe and solve problems in different domains. An example of such a tool is Alloy, which is a declarative constraint language for describing structures and a tool (Alloy Analyzer) for exploring them. However, these tools are limited in that they can not simulate the created instances and check their correctness. This is where tools such as Modelica comes in handy. Modelica is an equation based language to model complex physical systems from different domains. In order to combine the best of two worlds, this work describes a method to meta-model a domain specific using Alloy, where after the instances are translated to a Modelica model to simulate them.