Programming language criteria for model transformation evaluation

Abstract

Model Driven Engineering (MDE) has been considered as an effective discipline in the development of software systems. One integral concept of this paradigm is model-to-model transformation which can be used in different levels of abstraction. The prominent role of Model Transformations leads to use them to refine, refactor, migrate, improve, and analyze models. Currently, there exist numerous languages for model transformation. However, a major problem is the lack of an effective and comprehensive technique for assessment and comparison of model transformation approaches. To address this problem, in this paper, a new method has been developed based on the programming language evaluation criteria. Then, the proposed method has been applied on five widely-used model transformation languages. Analyzing the results demonstrate that no language is absolutely superior to the others; but rather we are enabled to choose an appropriate language for a certain application.