Automatically Generating Visual Modeling Environments EICS025

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) offers significant benefits but faces usability challenges, particularly in developing intuitive modeling interfaces. Most existing tools rely on textual or tree-based editors, which are often difficult for non-technical users to navigate. Creating custom graphical editors based on existing metamodels, a common way to describe modeling environments and languages, typically requires substantial manual effort and specialized knowledge of complex frameworks such as Sirius. These hurdles limit the broader adoption of MDE among developers and domain experts. Consequently, there is an increasing demand for automated, flexible, and user-friendly approaches to generating interfaces that can make MDE more accessible and practical across various domains.

In this work, we present a method for automatically generating a visual modeling environment from existing metamodels. Based on this method, we devised Model2Block , a command-line application that automatically generates block-based visual languages from metamodels defined using the Ecore language. The tool analyzes an input metamodel and produces a corresponding set of blocks, which are then integrated into a web-based environment. This enables users to visually build models using blocks that represent valid model elements.

We present an applicability study demonstrating that our method and tool were successfully applied to a publicly available dataset containing more than 50 metamodels. Moreover, we present a case study of a concrete modeling environment we generated from a metamodel, achieving, in this particular case, higher usability and lower workload than an existing tool.