Road to a reactive and incremental model transformation platform: three generations of the VIATRA framework

The current release of VIATRA provides open-source tool support for an event-driven, reactive model transformation engine built on top of highly scalable incremental graph queries for models with millions of elements and advanced features such as rule-based design space exploration complex event processing or model obfuscation. However, the history of the VIATRA model transformation framework dates back to over 16 years. Starting as an early academic research prototype as part of the M.Sc project of the the first author it first evolved into a Prolog-based engine followed by a family of open-source projects which by now matured into a component integrated into various industrial and open-source tools and deployed over multiple technologies. This invited paper briefly overviews the evolution of the VIATRA/IncQuery family by highlighting key features and illustrating main transformation concepts along an open case study influenced by an industrial project.