Change rule execution scheduling in incremental roundtrip engineering chain: From model-to-code and back

Abstract

Model driven engineering allows many stakeholders to contribute their expertise to the system description. This practice enables agility but implies consistency maintenance issues between different system models. Incremental model transformations (IMT) are used to synchronize different artifacts contributed by the stakeholders. IMTs detect changes on the source model and execute change rules to propagate updates to the target model. However, the execution of change rules is not straightforward. A rule is only correctly executed if its precondition is satisfied at execution time. The precondition checks the availability of certain source and target elements involved in the rule. If a rule is executed when the precondition is false, either the execution is blocked or stopped. Therefore, the produced target model becomes incorrect. This paper presents two approaches to the scheduling of change rule execution in incremental model transformations. These approaches are also applied to the case of model and code synchronization and implemented in a tool named IncRoundtrip that transforms and generates code for distributed systems. We also compare the runtime execution performance of different incremental approaches with batch transformation and evaluate their correctness.