A generic approach simplifying model-to-model transformation chains

  • Authors:
  • Gerd Kainz;Christian Buckl;Alois Knoll

  • Affiliations:
  • fortiss, Cyber-Physical Systems, Munich, Germany;fortiss, Cyber-Physical Systems, Munich, Germany;Faculty of Informatics, Technical University Munich, Garching, Germany

  • Venue:
  • MODELS'12 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The model-driven architecture proposes stepwise model refinement. The resulting model-to-model (M2M) transformation chains can consist of many steps. For realizing the transformations two approaches exist: Exogenous transformations, where input and output use different metamodels, and endogenous transformations, that use the same metamodel for input and output. Due to the particularities of embedded systems, using only endogenous transformations is not appropriate. For exogenous transformations, problems arise with respect to creation and maintenance of the subsequent metamodels. Another problem of these M2M transformation chains is that for one transformation step typically large parts of the model data remain unchanged. The resulting M2M transformation does often include many copy operations that distract the developers from the "real" transformations and increase implementation overhead. This paper introduces a generic approach that solves these issues by a (semi-) automatic metamodel construction and copy operation of unchanged model data between subsequent steps.