Model transformation on distributed platforms : decentralized persistence and distributed processing
Amine Benelallam · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2016
Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is gaining ground in industrial environments, thanks to its promise of lowering software development and maintenance effort. It has been adopted with success in producing software for several domains like civil engineering, car manufacturing and modernization of legacy software systems. As the models that need to be handled in model-driven engineering grow in scale, it became necessary to design scalable algorithms for model transformation (MT) as well as well-suitable persistence frameworks. One way to cope with these issues is to exploit the wide availability of distributed clusters in the Cloud for the distributed execution of model transformations and their persistence. On one hand, programming models such as MapReduce and Pregel may simplify the development of distributed model transformations. On the other hand, the availability of different categories of NoSQL databases may help to store efficiently the models. However, because of the dense interconnectivity of models and the complexity of transformation logics, scalability in distributed model processing is challenging. In this thesis, we propose our approach for scalable model transformation and persistence. We exploit the high-level of abstraction of relational MT languages and the well-defined semantics of existing distributed programming models to provide a relational model transformation engine with implicit distributed execution. The syntax of the MT language is not modified and no primitive for distribution is added. Hence developers are not required to have any acquaintance with distributed programming.We extend this approach with an efficient model distribution algorithm, based on the analysis of relational model transformation and recent results on balanced partitioning of streaming graphs. We applied our approach to a popular MT language, ATL, on top of a well-known distributed programming model, MapReduce. Finally, we propose a multi-persistence backend for manipulating and storing models in NoSQL databases according to the modeling scenario. Especially, we focus on decentralized model persistence for distributed model transformations.