Domain-specific templates for refinement transformations

Model transformations are a major instrument of model-driven software development. Especially in declarative transformation approaches, the structuring of transformations depends to a large extent on the structure of the source models and the generated artefacts. In many cases, similar code is written for transformations that deal with the same source or target metamodel. Writing such transformations can be simplified significantly if re-occurring parts within the transformation rules can be specified in a reusable way. Current approaches to transformation development include means for transformation reuse as well as inheritance. However, modularisation along the boundaries of different parts of domain metamodels is still lacking. Furthermore, the possibilities to reuse transformation fragments that re-occur in multiple transformations is limited. In this paper, we introduce domain-specific templates for refinement transformations with well-defined variation points. Transformation templates are based on known design patterns and enable a modular specification of refinement transformations and thus yield a simpler definition of transformations that can be grasped more easily and developed more efficiently. In addition, we present a real-world case study of transformation templates in the context of component based software architectures. The case study gives insight into the application of the presented approach.