Automated Reuse of Model Transformations through Typing Requirements Models

摘要

Model transformations are key elements of model-driven engineering, where they arc used to automate the manipulation of models. However, they are typed with respect to concrete source and target meta-models, making their reuse for other (even similar) meta-models challenging.To improve this situation, we propose capturing the typing requirements for reusing a transformation with other meta-models by the notion of a typing requirements model (TRM). A TRM describes the prerequisites that a model transformation imposes on the source and target meta-models to obtain a correct typing. The key observation is that any meta-model pair that satisfies the TRM is a valid reuse context for the transformation at hand.A TRM is made of two domain requirement models (DRMs) describing the requirements for the source arid target meta-models, and a compatibility model expressing dependencies between them. We define a notion of refinement between DRMs and see meta-models as a special case of DRM. We provide a catalogue of valid refinements and describe how to automatically extract a TRM from an ATL transformation. The approach is supported by our tool TOTEM. We report on two experiments based on transformations developed by third parties and meta-model mutation techniques-validating the correctness and completeness of our TRM extraction procedure and confirming the power of TRMs to encode variability and support flexible reuse.