Generic and Meta-Transformations for Model Transformation Engineering

The Model Driven Architecture necessitates not only the application of software engineering disciplines to the specification of modeling languages (language-ware) but also to design inter and intra-language model transformations (transformation-ware). Although many model transformation approaches exist, their focus is almost exclusively put on functional correctness and intuitive description language while the importance of engineering issues such as reusability, maintainability, performance or compactness are neglected. To tackle these problems following the MDA philosophy, we argue in the paper that model transformations should also be regarded as models (i.e., as data). More specifically, we demonstrate (i) how generic transformations can provide a very compact description of certain transformation problems and (ii) how meta-transformations can be designed that yield efficient transformations as their output model.