Reusing model transformations through typing requirements models

Abstract

Model transformations are key elements of Model-Drive Engineering (MDE), where they are used to automate the manipulation of models. However, they are typed with respect to concrete source and target meta-models and hence their reuse for other (even similar) meta-models becomes challenging. In this paper, we describe a method to extract a typing requirements model (TRM) from an ATL model-to-model transformation. A TRM describes the requirements that the transformation needs from the source and target meta-models in order to obtain a transformation with a syntactically correct typing. A TRM is made of three parts, two of them describing the requirements for the source and target meta-models, and the last expressing dependencies between both.We define a notion of conformance of meta-model pairs with respect to TRMs. This way, the transformation can be used with any meta-model conforming to the TRM.We present tool support and an experimental validation of correctness and completeness using meta-model mutation techniques, obtaining promising results.