Multi-step learning and adaptive search for learning complex model transformations from examples

Abstract

Model-driven engineering promotes models as main development artifacts. As several models may be manipulated during the software-development life cycle, model transformations ensure their consistency by automating model generation and update tasks. However, writing model transformations requires much knowledge and effort that detract from their benefits. To address this issue, Model Transformation by Example (MTBE) aims to learn transformation programs from source and target model pairs supplied as examples. In this article, we tackle the fundamental issues that prevent the existing MTBE approaches from efficiently solving the problem of learning model transformations. We show that, when considering complex transformations, the search space is too large to be explored by naive search techniques. We propose an MTBE process to learn complex model transformations by considering three common requirements: element context and state dependencies and complex value derivation. Our process relies on two strategies to reduce the size of the search space and to better explore it, namely, multi-step learning and adaptive search. We experimentally evaluate our approach on seven model transformation problems. The learned transformation programs are able to produce perfect target models in three transformation cases, whereas precision and recall values larger than 90% are recorded for the four remaining cases.