Generic and Meta-transformations for Model Transformation Engineering

Abstract

Abstract. The Model Driven Architecture necessitates not only the application of software engineering disciplines to the specification of modeling languages (language-ware) but also to design inter and intralanguage model transformations (transformation-ware). Although many model transformation approaches exist, their focus is almost exclusively put on functional correctness and intuitive description language while the importance of engineering issues such as reusability, maintainability, performance or compactness are neglected. To tackle these problems following the MDA philosophy, we argue in the paper that model transformations should also be regarded as models (i.e., as data). More specifically, we demonstrate (i) how generic transformations can provide a very compact description of certain transformation problems and (ii) how meta-transformations can be designed that yield efficient transformations as their output model. Keywords: model transformation, metamodeling, meta-transformation, generic transformation. Towards Model Transformation Engineering in MDAMDA and language engineering. Recently, the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) of the Object Management Group (OMG) has become a dominant trend in software engineering. The main idea of the MDA framework is the use of models during the entire system design cycle. At first, the central business logic functionality on the target system is captured by the so-called platform-independent model (PIM). Information on the target software platform is added in a later phase when mapping PIMs into platform-specific models (PSMs). Finally, the entire source code of the target application can be generated automatically.A key factor in the success of the MDA is thus the development of industrialstrength models in various modeling languages. Several metamodeling approaches [3,6,10,24] have been flourishing to provide solid foundations for language engineering (or language-ware) to allow systems engineers to design a language for their own domain. As being the standard and visual object-oriented modeling language, UML obviously plays a key role also in language design.This work was partially supported by the Hungarian National Scientific Foundation Grant (OTKA 038027). Many model transformation approaches exist (including the official proposals submitted to the QVT RFP and overviewed in [12]). An "ultimate debate" that separates these approaches is about the way of specifying transformations: declarative approaches (like [2,13,16]) define a relation between elements of the source and target modeling language while operational approaches (such as [20,26,14,25,23]) define rules to describe what steps are required to derive the target model from a given source model. Mixed approaches (see [21]) typically use declarative relations first which are manually refined into operational rules later on. In general, declarative approaches tend to be more intuitive for software engineers (i.e., it is easier to write and understand declarative transformations) while it is easier to automa...

Reverse Engineering of Model Transformations for Reusability

“…The former include reuse mechanisms for single rules, like rule inheritance [11], and for whole transformations, like superimposition [19] and phases [14]. Regarding type-independent approaches, there are fine-grained techniques like parameterized rules [8,10,17], and coarse-grained ones aimed at reusing complete transformations [16]. Among these proposals, only [16] supports the reuse of transformations for arbitrary meta-models, as in our case.…”

Flexible Model-to-Model Transformation Templates: An Application to ATL.

“…For instance, in [ALS08], transformation rules can define String parameters with the name of classes, attributes and associations which are resolved at run-time. In [VP04], the type of the objects in a rule can be variables which are also resolved at run-time. In addition, in this latter approach one can build meta-transformations to generate first-order rules where the variables are substituted by concrete types of a specific language, thus obtaining more efficient rules.…”

Semantic-Based Development of Service-Oriented Systems

“…In Sect. 3 we present the SENSORIA model transformation approach and show how we use the VIATRA2 [37,2] model transformation tool for translating UML diagrams with compensation into the Saga calculus and therefore giving semantics to compensations. In Sect.…”

“…By having both languages, SENSORIA covers both pragmatical and formal mathematical approaches to model transformations. VIATRA2 [37,2] (Visual Automated Model Transformations) is a model transformation language supporting graph transformation rules and imperative abstract state VIATRA2 is a fully hybrid language since it allows to call graph transformation rules from imperative code through rule application calls, and also to call ASM code from declarative graph transformation rules. Nevertheless, VIATRA2 delivers a formal semantics of transformations along with the language.…”