An Approach to Composing Concerns for an Executable Unified Domain Model

In Domain-Driven Design (DDD), the domain model plays a pivotal role. A domain model must precisely reflect the rules, behaviors, and logic of the problem domain. Current DDD methods typically focus on either the structural aspects or the behavioral aspects. However, other domain concerns, gathered from various stakeholders, are often overlooked. They need to be systematically defined and integrated to create an executable unified domain model. This paper presents a novel approach to composing concerns within an executable unified domain model. In our method, each concern is represented as a model in its corresponding DSL. We introduce an annotation-based mechanism for composing these concern models. The concern DSL combines both external and internal DSLs, ensuring the executability of the unified domain model. We have developed a support tool based on the EMF / ATL/Acceleo modeling framework and the DDD framework JDA. To demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we applied the proposed method to several typical concern domains using the corresponding DSLs. The results demonstrate enhanced expressiveness, modularity, and executability of the unified domain model in the context of DDD.