Model integration and transformation: a triple graph grammar-based QVT implementation

Nowadays, software and system development projects involve an increasing number of various CASE tools each of which is specialized in certain tasks or phases of the development process. This results in an unrelated distribution of the data of a project as a whole over the different data repositories of the considered tools. The task of manually keeping the data consistent is cumbersome, time consuming, and error prone. Therefore, there is an urgent need for automatic support in data consistency checking and consistency enforcement. OMG’s Query / View / Transformation (QVT) standard provides a model-based language for the specification of consistency checking and consistency enforcement rules. The QVT standard currently is implemented by a number of different groups but suffers from the fact that it lacks a proper formalization up to now. In contrast Triple Graph Grammars (TGGs) provide a declarative language for the specification of consistency checking and consistency enforcement rules based on the formal foundation of graph grammars. However, TGGs lack some concepts provided by the QVT standard which are needed in practice to be applicable. This work transfers TGGs into OMG’s world of metamodeling and extends them by the desired concepts from QVT. The result is an TGG-based implementation of the QVT standard based on the formalism of graph grammars. Furthermore, the presented approach will be supplemented by a framework for automatically checking and enforcing the consistency of distributed data of a considered development project as a whole.