A Contract-Based Specification Method for Model Transformations

Abstract

Model transformations play an essential role in model-driven engineering. However, model transformations are often complex to develop, maintain, and ensure quality. Platform-independent specification languages for transformations are required to fully and accurately express requirements of transformation systems and to offer support for realization and verification tasks. Several specification languages have been proposed, but it still lacks a strong one based on a solid formal foundation for both high expressiveness and usability. This paper introduces a language called TC4MT to precisely specify requirements of transformations. The language is designed based on a combination of a contract-based approach and the graph theory foundation of triple graph grammar. Specifically, we consider graph patterns as core elements of our language and provide a concrete syntax in the form of UML class diagrams together with OCL conditions to visually and intuitively represent such pattern-based specifications. We develop a support tool and evaluate our proposed method by comparing it with current methods in literature.