Model transformation based on production rules

Abstract

This paper aims at presenting a particular kind of “model” transformation technique. The concerned models are computer application models at a “user design” level, in opposition to design models too close to implementation programs. The models are technically reified as objects in an object-oriented execution environment and in a tool. The used transformation technique is based on applying first order forward chaining production rules to the objects reifying the models. The essential feature of the transformation technique is of locally filtering configurations, or interconnections, of objects - a kind of pattern matching - within a model, and then launching actions in order either to modify the local configurations matched and thus the model, or to create and update an external transformed model. The programmatic expression of such a transformation is made in the framework tool according to a meta-modeling support, where model elements are considered as “instances” of explicitly meta-modeled “classes”. One of the other interesting properties of this kind of expression for transformations is concerning the way that the control of its execution might itself be from implicitly to less or more partially expressed.After giving a little more details on the principles of the transformation technique we use to practice, we detail two simple examples of transformation being representative of the technique. Then we try to give a first typology of the transformation elements we are dealing with. Following, we compare our favorite technique to some others, mainly to XSL based transformation we have also applied on XML model representations. Finally we conclude on reviewing our practices and on setting some perspectives of our current work.