Model Transformation by Graph Transformation: A Comparative Study Gabriele Taentzer1, Karsten Ehrig1, Esther Guerra2, Juan de Lara3, Laszlo Lengyel4, Tihamer Levendovszky4, Ulrike Prange1, Daniel Varro4, and Szilvia Varro-Gyapay4 1 Technische Universit¨atBerlin, Germany {karstene,gabi,ullip}@cs.tu-berlin.de 2 Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
[email protected] 3 Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
[email protected] 4 Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary {varro,gyapay}@mit.bme.hu {lengyel,tihamer}@aut.bme.hu Abstract. Graph transformation has been widely used for expressing model transformations. Especially transformations of visual models can be naturally formulated by graph transformations, since graphs are well suited to describe the underlying structures of models. Based on a com- mon sample model transformation, four different model transformation approaches are presented which all perform graph transformations. At first, a basic solution is presented and crucial points of model transforma- tions are indicated. Subsequent solutions focus mainly on the indicated problems. Finally, a first comparison of the chosen approaches to model transformation is presented where the main ingredients of each approach are summarized. 1 Introduction Raising the abstraction level from textual programming languages to visual mod- eling languages, model transformation techniques and tools have become more focused recently. Model transformation problems can be formulated as graph transformation problems, thus, a variety of tools choose this technique as the underlying mechanism for the transformation engine. This paper aims at com- paring four approaches to model transformation that apply graph transforma- tion techniques for model transformation. These can be characterized by their tool support. The presented tools are AGG [1], AToM3 [15], VIATRA2 [25] and VMTS [26] [16].