A comparison of rule inheritance in model-to-model transformation languages

  • Authors:

  • Manuel Wimmer;Gerti Kappel;Angelika Kusel;Werner Retschitzegger;Johannes Schönböck;Wieland Schwinger;Dimitris Kolovos;Richard Paige;Marius Lauder;Andy Schürr;Dennis Wagelaar

  • Affiliations:

  • Vienna University of Technology, Austria;Vienna University of Technology, Austria;Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria;Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria;Vienna University of Technology, Austria;Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria;University of York, United Kingdom;University of York, United Kingdom;Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany;Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany;AtlanMod, INRIA & École des Mines de Nantes, France

  • Venue:
  • ICMT'11 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Theory and practice of model transformations
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Although model transformations presumably play a major role in Model-Driven Engineering, reuse mechanisms such as inheritance have received little attention so far. In this paper, we propose a comparison framework for rule inheritance in declarative model-to-model transformation languages, and provide an in-depth evaluation of three prominent representatives thereof, namely ATL, ETL (declarative subsets thereof), and TGGs. The framework provides criteria for comparison along orthogonal dimensions, covering static aspects, which indicate whether a set of inheriting transformation rules is well-formed at compile-time, and dynamic aspects, which describe how inheriting rules behave at run-time. The application of this framework to dedicated transformation languages shows that, while providing similar syntactical inheritance concepts, they exhibit different dynamic inheritance semantics and offer basic support for checking static inheritance semantics, only.