Schema Compliant Consistency Management via Triple Graph Grammars and Integer Linear Programming

Abstract

In the field of Model-Driven Engineering, Triple Graph Grammars(TGGs) play an important role as a rule-based means of implementingconsistency management. From a declarative specification of aconsistency relation, several operations including forward andbackward transformations, (concurrent) synchronisation, andconsistency checks can be automatically derived. For TGGs to beapplicable in realistic application scenarios, expressiveness interms of supported language features is very important. A TGG toolis schema compliant if it can take domain constraints, such asmultiplicity constraints in a meta-model, into account whenperforming consistency management tasks. To guarantee schemacompliance, most TGG tools allow application conditions to beattached as necessary to relevant rules. This strategy isproblematic for at least two reasons: First, ensuring compliance toa sufficiently expressive schema for all previously mentionedderived operations is still an open challenge; to the best of ourknowledge, all existing TGG tools only support a very restrictedsubset of application conditions. Second, it is conceptuallydemanding for the user to indirectly specify domain constraints asapplication conditions, especially because this has to be completelyrevisited every time the TGG or domain constraint is changed. Whiledomain constraints can in theory be automatically transformed toobtain the required set of application conditions, this has onlybeen successfully transferred to TGGs for a very limited subset ofdomain constraints. To address these limitations, this paperproposes a search-based strategy for achieving schema compliance. Weshow that all correctness and completeness properties, previouslyproven in a setting without domain constraints, still hold whenschema compliance is to be additionally guaranteed. Animplementation and experimental evaluation are provided to supportour claim of practical applicability.