Towards a sustainable artifact model

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Model-driven development (MDD) facilitates automatic programming language file generation from explicitly defined models, managing numerous artifacts with various relationships. A significant class of these relationships arises from artifacts using others, differing from generation dependencies where artifacts are transformed from one to another. MDD projects typically involve multiple dependent process steps, leading to a chain of artifact generations, compilations, and packaging. During these processes, numerous artifacts are created, read, or executed, resulting in complex interdependencies that can cause issues like poor maintainability and extended development times. Understanding the involved artifacts and their relationships is crucial for addressing these challenges. This report presents an abstract artifact model and applies it to examine the types of artifacts and related concepts pertinent to Java projects, a common project type. We explore the core of generative projects by analyzing the generator as a set of artifacts executed at design time. To define all relevant concepts precisely, we introduce the Artifact Model (AM), enabling a model-based specification of the types of artifacts, their corresponding concepts, and their relationships.