HP-Graph as a Basis of a DSM Platform Visual Model Editor

Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming of the RAS. 2020. Vol. 32. No. 2. P. 149–160.

LYADOVA L.N., SUVOROV N.M.

The language-oriented approach is becoming more and more popular in the development of information systems, but the existing DSM platforms that implement this paradigm have significant limitations, including insufficient expressive capabilities of the models used to implement visual model editors for complex subject areas and limited abilities to transform visual models. Visual languages are usually based on graph models, but the types of graphs used have certain limitations, such as insufficient expressiveness, the complexity of representing large-dimensional models and operation executions. For creating a tool that does not have the described constraints, development of a new formal model is needed. HP-graphs can become a solution for this problem. It is not only possible to create new visual languages for diverse domains based on them, but also to develop efficient algorithms to perform different operations on models constructed using these languages. The HP-graph definition is given and the justification of the expressive power of the proposed model is presented, the main operations for HP-graphs are described. The chosen graph formalism combines the capabilities of different types of graphs to represent visual models and allows creating a flexible model editor for the DSM platform, to implement effective algorithms of performing operations, in particular, model transformations.

Keywords: графовая модель, domain-specific language, предметно-ориентированный язык, DSM-платформа, алгоритмы на графах, визуальная модель, DSM platform, visual model, graph model, HP-graph, algorithms on graphs, HP-граф