Bidirectional transformations for self-adaptive systems

Abstract

Bidirectional transformations are a synchronisation mechanism between documents, a source, and a view. A bidirectional transformation is a pair of functions, one that extracts a view from a source and the other that updates a source according to changes made to the view. Bidirectional programming is a recent technique that helps developers to easily write bidirectional transformations and ensure that they satisfy properties of interest. In this chapter, we argue that bidirectional transformations and bidirectional programming are useful techniques in the context of self-adaptive systems.We present four applications of bidirectional transformation for construction of adaptive systems: abstraction, separation of concerns, rule-based adaptation, and uncertainty-aware programming.