Improving higher-order transformations support in ATL

Abstract

In Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), Higher-Order Transformations (HOTs) are model transformations that analyze, produce or manipulate other model transformations. In a previous survey we classified them, and showed their usefulness in different MDE scenarios. However, writing HOTs is generally considered a time-consuming and error-prone task, and often results in verbose code. In this paper we present several proposals to facilitate the definition of HOTs in ATL. Each proposal focuses on a specific kind of scenario. We validate our proposals by assessing their impact over the full list of HOTs described in the survey. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.