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Case-based exploration of bidirectional transformations in QVT Relations

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Abstract

QVT Relations (QVT-R), a standard issued by the Object Management Group, is a language for the declarative specification of model transformations. This paper focuses on a particularly interesting feature of QVT-R: the declarative specification of bidirectional transformations. Rather than writing two unidirectional transformations separately, a transformation developer may provide a single relational specification which may be executed in both directions. This approach saves specification effort and ensures the consistency of forward and backward transformations. This paper explores QVT-R’s support for bidirectional model transformations through a spectrum of transformation cases. The transformation cases vary with respect to several factors such as the size of the transformation definition or the relationships between the metamodels for source and target models. The cases are solved in QVT-R, but may be applied to other bidirectional transformation languages, as well; thus, they may be used as a benchmark for comparing bidirectional transformation languages. In our work, we focus on the following research questions: functionality of bidirectional transformations in terms of relations between source and target models, solvability (which problems may be solved by a single relational specification of a bidirectional transformation), variability (does a bidirectional transformation contain varying elements, i.e., elements being specific to one direction), comprehensibility (referring to the ease of understanding and constructing QVT-R transformations), and the semantic soundness of bidirectional transformations written in QVT-R.

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Notes

  1. https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/modeling.mmt.qvtd.

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Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the constructive comments of the unknown reviewers.

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  1. Applied Computer Science I, University of Bayreuth, 95440, Bayreuth, Germany

    Bernhard Westfechtel

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Correspondence to Bernhard Westfechtel.

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Communicated by Prof. Perdita Stevens.

This paper is an extended version of [60].

http://btn1x4.inf.uni-bayreuth.de/qvt/QVT-Examples.zip provides the full metamodels and specifications presented in this paper. The specifications were developed and tested with medini QVT, version 1.7.0 under Eclipse Indigo (see further comments in Sect. 8.2).

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Westfechtel, B. Case-based exploration of bidirectional transformations in QVT Relations. Softw Syst Model 17, 989–1029 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-016-0527-z

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