Model construction with external constraints:an interactive journey from semantics to syntax

Mainstream development environments have recently assimilated guidance technologies based on constraint satisfaction. We investigate one class of such technologies, namely, interactive guided derivation of models, where the editing system assists a designer by providing hints about valid editing operations that maintain global correctness. We provide a semantics-based classification of such guidance systems and investigate concrete guidance algorithms for two kinds of modeling languages: a simple subset of class-diagram-like language and for feature models. Both algorithms are efficient and provide exhaustive guidance.