Development of Transformation Systems

Abstract

The construction of models of software systems is a process, that proceeds from more abstract and conceptual descriptions to more concrete and technical ones. To support this process a modelling technique must provide operations for the construction of new models from given ones, and relations that allow the comparison of given models. According to the semantical focus of the transformation system approach, only semantically compatible development relations are considered here. This means that if a more concrete model is a development of a more abstract one, then the structure and the behaviour specified by the abstract model should in a certain sense be preserved or reflected by the more concrete one. There are different possibilities to formulate this property. The overall approach pursued here is again to combine development relations from abstract data type specification and behaviour specification techniques. According to the structure of transformation systems, these are reflected as mappings at the behaviour (transition graph) and structure (data space) levels. Thus the two mappings may have the same or opposite directions.