Behaviour Protection in Modular Rule-Based System Specifications

Abstract

Abstract. Model-driven engineering (MDE) and, in particular, the notion of domain-specific modelling languages (DSMLs) is an increasingly popular approach to systems development. DSMLs are particularly interesting because they allow encoding domain-knowledge into a modelling language and enable full code generation and analysis based on high-level models. However, as a result of the domain-specificity of DSMLs, there is a need for many such languages. This means that their use only becomes economically viable if the development of new DSMLs can be made efficient. One way to achieve this is by reusing functionality across DSMLs. On this background, we are working on techniques for modularising DSMLs into reusable units. Specifically, we focus on DSMLs whose semantics are defined through in-place model transformations. In this paper, we present a formal framework of morphisms between graph-transformation systems (GTSs) that allow us to define a novel technique for conservative extensions of such DSMLs. In particular, we define different behaviour-aware GTS morphisms and prove that they can be used to define conservative extensions of a GTS.

Amalgamation of domain specific languages with behaviour

“…This paper is an extension of our earlier work in [44,13,14]. Beyond a comprehensive presentation of the core concepts, this paper extends the work to situations where more than two DSLs need to be composed.…”

“…In this section, we give a brief overview of the main elements of our approach to composing graph-transformation systems. Some of the results in this section build on results presented in [13], appropriate references are provided when necessary. The main focus of our presentation in this paper is on the extension of these concepts to traces and to the composition of more than two graph-transformation systems.…”

“…(GTS morphism [13]) Given GTSs GTS i = (TG i , P i , π i ), for i = 0, 1, a GTS morphism f : GTS 0 → GTS 1 , with f = (f TG , f P , f r ), is given by a morphism f TG : TG 0 → TG 1 , a surjective mapping f P : P 1 → P 0 between the sets of rule names, and a family of rule morphisms f r = {f p :…”

“…(Behaviour-reflecting GTS morphism [13]) Given transformation systems GTS i = (TG i , P i , π i ), for i = 0, 1, a GTS morphism f : GTS 0 → GTS 1 reflects behaviour if for all graphs G, H in |Graph TG1 |, all rules p in P 1 , and all matches…”

“…This definition of behaviour-protecting morphisms is different to the one in [13]. According to the definition in [13], a GTS morphism f : GTS 0 → GTS 1 is behaviourprotecting if for all graphs G and H in |Graph TG1 |, all rules p in P 1 , and all matches…”