Comparison of Graph-based Model Transformation Rules

By: Alexander Schultheiß, Alexander Boll, Timo Kehrer

Abstract

With model transformations arising to primary development artifacts in Model-Driven Engineering, dedicated tools supporting transformation developers in the development and maintenance of model transfor- mations are strongly required. In this paper, we address the versioning of model transformations, which essentially relies on a basic service for comparing different versions of model transformations, e.g., a local workspace version and the latest version of a repository. Focusing on rule-based model transformations based on graph transformation concepts, we propose to compare such transformation rules using a maximum common subgraph (MCS) algorithm as the underlying matching engine. Although the MCS problem is known as a non-polynomial optimization problem, our research hypothesis is that using an MCS algorithm as a basis for comparing graph-based transformation rules is feasible for real-world model transformations and increases the quality of comparison results compared to standard model comparison algorithms. Experimental results obtained on a benchmark set for model transformation confirm this hypothesis.

Keywords

model transformation development, transformation comparison, graph-based transformation rules, maximum common subgraphs

Cite as:

Alexander Schultheiß, Alexander Boll, Timo Kehrer, “Comparison of Graph-based Model Transformation Rules”, Journal of Object Technology, Volume 19, no. 2 (July 2020), pp. 3:1-21, doi:10.5381/jot.2020.19.2.a3.

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