Change propagation in an internal model transformation language

Abstract

Despite good results, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) has not been widely adopted in industry. According to studies by Staron and Mohaghegi [1,2], the lack of tool support is one of the major reasons for this. Although MDE has existed for more than a decade now, tool support is still insufficient. An approach to overcome this limitation for model transformations, which are a key part of MDE, is the usage of internal languages that reuse tool support for existing host languages. On the other hand, these internal languages typically do not provide key features like change propagation or bidirectional transformation. In this paper, we present an approach to use a single internal model transformation language to create unidirectional and bidirectional model transformations with optional change propagation. In total, we currently provide 18 operation modes based on a single specification. At the same time, the language may reuse tool support for C#. We validate the applicability of our language using a synthetic example with a transformation from finite state machines to Petri nets where we achieved speedups of up to 48 compared to classical batch transformations.