Towards Generic Semi-Automatic Transformation Process in MDA

Abstract

The Model Driven Engineering (MDE) has been proposed to support the development, maintenance and evolution of software systems. In this context several approaches for transformation models have been proposed in the literature. They suffer from two major limitations: i) they have been tested on homogeneous metamodels (e.g., Ecore, UML, Minjava, Kermeta ...), and ii) they use common notions and concepts, such as modeling, matching and processing models. In some approaches they do not distinguish between matching, mapping and transformation. This leads to confusion between these operations. Indeed, it is well recognized that model transformation is at the heart of approaches MDE and it is derived from the mapping model, itself obtained after performing a matching process. In this paper, we propose, in a first part, an extended architecture to semi-automate the process of transformation models. It is the separation of concerns by distinguishing the operations matching, mapping and transformation taking into account several factors (e.g., semantic resources, pre-matching efforts and post-matching efforts...). In the second part, and to test the heterogeneity of metamodels that will be taken as input by matching techniques, we introduce two new types of metamodels representing respectively the multi-agents system platform JADE, and the BPEL language for the web services orchestration. To validate our proposal, our architecture is implemented on a matching technique which details the various steps leading to a semi-automatic transformation process.