2020/05/29 by Lars G. Fritsche, Jens Kosiol, Fritsche, Lars +5
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Model-Driven Software Engineering Techniques #Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software System Performance and Reliability
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2005.14510
openalex publication_date 2020/05/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Model synchronization, i.e., the task of restoring consistency between two\ninterrelated models after a model change, is a challenging task. Triple Graph\nGrammars (TGGs) specify model consistency by means of rules that describe how\nto create consistent pairs of models. These rules can be used to automatically\nderive further rules, which describe how to propagate changes from one model to\nthe other or how to change one model in such a way that propagation is\nguaranteed to be possible. Restricting model synchronization to these derived\nrules, however, may lead to unnecessary deletion and recreation of model\nelements during change propagation. This is inefficient and may cause\nunnecessary information loss, i.e., when deleted elements contain information\nthat is not represented in the second model, this information cannot be\nrecovered easily. Short-cut rules have recently been developed to avoid\nunnecessary information loss by reusing existing model elements. In this paper,\nwe show how to automatically derive (short-cut) repair rules from short-cut\nrules to propagate changes such that information loss is avoided and model\nsynchronization is accelerated. The key ingredients of our rule-based model\nsynchronization process are these repair rules and an incremental pattern\nmatcher informing about suitable applications of them. We prove the termination\nand the correctness of this synchronization process and discuss its\ncompleteness. As a proof of concept, we have implemented this synchronization\nprocess in eMoflon, a state-of-the-art model transformation tool with inherent\nsupport of bidirectionality. Our evaluation shows that repair processes based\non (short-cut) repair rules have considerably decreased information loss and\nimproved performance compared to former model synchronization processes based\non TGGs.\n