A Model-Based Development Approach for Model Transformations

Model transformations have become a key element of modeldriven software development, being used to transform platform-independent models (PIMs) to platform-specific models (PSMs), to improve model quality, to introduce design patterns and refactorings, and to map models from one language to another. A large number of model transformation notations and tools exist, however, there remain substantial problems concerning the analysis and verification of model transformations. In particular, there is no systematic development process for model transformations. In this paper, we provide a unified semantic treatment of model transformations, and show how correctness properties of model transformations can be defined. We define a systematic model-driven development process for model transformations based on this semantics, and we describe case studies using this process.