Specification and Validation of Model Transformations

Certifying critical systems requires very precise specifications and ability to verify each development step. However, proofreading and test based verification are usually not exhaustive and as systems get more complex, their coverage is less and less adequate. Use of models allows early verification, validation and automated building of “correct by construction” systems. Our work targets formal specification and verification of model transformations. Such techniques provide significantly higher confidence of correctness and can even reach exhaustiveness. In this paper, we rely on common model driven engineering techniques to allow common engineers to write these specifications and to conduct verification. We propose to use a simple transformation model for specifying the expected relation between the source and target models after the transformation. The source and target metamodels are extended with a traceability model that defines a set of links that must exist after the transformation and whose correctness is specified as OCL constraints.