GRACE TECHNICAL REPORTS Towards Compositional Approach to Model Transformation for Software Development
Soichiro Hidaka, Zhenjiang Hu, Kato K. Nakano · 2008
Model transformation plays an important role in Model-Driven Software Development that aims to introduce significant efficiencies and rigor to the theory and practice of software development. Although models may have different notation and representation, they are basically graphs, and model transformations are thus nothing but graph transformations. Despite a large amount of theoretical work and a lot of experience with research prototype on graph-based model transformations, it remains as an open issue how to compose model transformations. In this paper, we report our first attempt at a compositional framework for graph-based model transformations based on the graph query language UnQL. We show that the idea of UnQL that graph queries are fully captured by structural recursion can be adapted to structure graph transformations to attain efficient composition of model transformations. We have implemented a prototype of the framework and tested with several nontrivial examples. Our new framework supports systematic development of model transformation in the large, while guaranteeing that inefficiency due to this composition is automatically removed.