Library Concepts for Model Reuse

Reuse and the composition of libraries of partial system descriptions is a fundamental and well-understood practice in software engineering, as long as we talk about source code. For models and modeling languages, the concepts of reuse often are limited to copy & paste, especially when it comes to domain-specific modeling languages (DSLs). This paper attempts to give an overview of techniques for including support for reuse and library concepts both in the meta-model and the modeling tool, and presents a novel generative approach for this task. The technical consequences for each of the approaches presented are discussed and compared to each other.