Efficient Model Synchronization by Automatically Constructed Repair Processes

Fritsche, Lars; Kosiol, Jens; Schürr, Andy; Taentzer, Gabriele

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-16722-6_7

Cited by 9 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This paper extends the work in [23]. Beyond [23], we -present the actual synchronization process in pseudocode and prove its correctness and termination (based on the results obtained in [23,41,42]), -extend our approach to deal with filter NACs (a specific kind of negative application conditions in forward rules), -describe the implementation, especially the tool architecture, in more detail, -extend the evaluation by investigating the expressiveness of short-cut repair rules at the practical example of code refactorings [21], and -consider the related work more comprehensively.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 83%

“…Our derivation of repair rules is based on the construction of so-called short-cut rules [22], which we recall as well. For simplicity, we stick with settheoretic definitions of the involved concepts (in contrast to category-theoretic ones as, e.g., in [17,18,22,23]). Moreover, while we provide formal definitions for central notions, we will just explain others and provide references for their formal definitions.…”

Section: Preliminaries: Triple Graphs Triple Graph Grammars and Theimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For more details (in particular, the definition of morphisms between partial triple graphs), we refer the interested reader to the literature [23,37]. In this paper, we are more interested in conveying the intuition behind these rules by presenting examples.…”

Section: Given a Triple Graphmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Section 6 focuses on the implemented synchronization algorithm and its formal properties. To be understandable to readers who are not experts on algebraic graph transformation, we use a settheoretical notion in these more technical sections, in contrast to the original contribution in [23] which is based on category theory. Section 7 describes the implementation of our model synchronization algorithm in eMoflon, focussing on the tool architecture.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Theorem 2([23, Theorem 8]) Let the transformation sequencex (3) be given and let r sc be a short-cut rule that is derived from (r j , r ). If the following three conditions are met, this sequence is equivalent to sequence (4) where original TGG rules are applied only.1.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Avoiding unnecessary information loss: correct and efficient model synchronization based on triple graph grammars

Fritsche

Kosiol

Schürr

et al. 2020

Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Model synchronization, i.e., the task of restoring consistency between two interrelated models after a model change, is a challenging task. Triple graph grammars (TGGs) specify model consistency by means of rules that describe how to create consistent pairs of models. These rules can be used to automatically derive further rules, which describe how to propagate changes from one model to the other or how to change one model in such a way that propagation is guaranteed to be possible. Restricting model synchronization to these derived rules, however, may lead to unnecessary deletion and recreation of model elements during change propagation. This is inefficient and may cause unnecessary information loss, i.e., when deleted elements contain information that is not represented in the second model, this information cannot be recovered easily. Short-cut rules have recently been developed to avoid unnecessary information loss by reusing existing model elements. In this paper, we show how to automatically derive (short-cut) repair rules from short-cut rules to propagate changes such that information loss is avoided and model synchronization is accelerated. The key ingredients of our rule-based model synchronization process are these repair rules and an incremental pattern matcher informing about suitable applications of them. We prove the termination and the correctness of this synchronization process and discuss its completeness. As a proof of concept, we have implemented this synchronization process in eMoflon, a state-of-the-art model transformation tool with inherent support of bidirectionality. Our evaluation shows that repair processes based on (short-cut) repair rules have considerably decreased information loss and improved performance compared to former model synchronization processes based on TGGs.

show abstract