Model-to-model transformations by demonstration

Abstract

During the last decade several approaches have been proposed for easing the burden of writing model transformation rules manually. Among them are Model Transformation By-Demonstration (MTBD) approaches which record actions performed on example models to derive general operations. A current restriction of MTBD is that until now they are only available for in-place transformations, but not for model-to-model (M2M) transformations. In this paper, we extend our MTBD approach, which is designed for in-place transformations, to also support M2M transformations. In particular, we propose to demonstrate each transformation rule by modeling a source model fragment and a corresponding target model fragment. From these example pairs, the applied edit operations are computed which are input for a semi-automatic process for deriving the general transformation rules. For showing the applicability of the approach, we developed an Eclipse-based prototype supporting the generation of ATL code out of EMF-based example models. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.