Synchronization of Models of Rich Languages with Triple Graph Grammars: An Experience Report

We report our experience of using Triple Graph Grammars (TGG) to synchronize models of the rich and complex Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL), an aerospace standard of the Society of Automotive Engineers. A synchronization layer has been developed between the OSATE (Open Source AADL Tool Environment) textual editor and the Adele graphical editor in order to improve their integration. Adele has been designed to support editing AADL models in a way that does not necessarily follow the structure of the language, but is adapted to the way designers think. For this reason, it operates on a different meta-model than OSATE. As a result, changes on the graphical model must be propagated automatically to the textual model to ensure consistency of the models. Since Adele does not cover the complete AADL language, this must be done without re-instantiation of the objects to avoid losing the information not represented in the graphical part. The TGG language implemented in the MoTE tool has been used to synchronize the tools. Our results provide a validation of the TGG approach for synchronizing models of large meta-models, but also show that model synchronization remains a challenging task, since several improvements of the TGG language and its tool were required to succeed.