Advanced Model Consistency Restoration with Higher-Order Short-Cut Rules

Abstract

Sequential model synchronisation is the task of propagating changes from onemodel to another correlated one to restore consistency. It is challenging toperform this propagation in a least-changing way that avoids unnecessarydeletions (which might cause information loss). From a theoretical point ofview, so-called short-cut (SC) rules have been developed that enable provablycorrect propagation of changes while avoiding information loss. However, to beable to react to every possible change, an infinite set of such rules might benecessary. Practically, only small sets of pre-computed basic SC rules havebeen used, severely restricting the kind of changes that can be propagatedwithout loss of information. In this work, we close that gap by developing anapproach to compute more complex required SC rules on-the-fly duringsynchronisation. These higher-order SC rules allow us to cope with more complexscenarios when multiple changes must be handled in one step. We implemented ourapproach in the model transformation tool eMoflon. An evaluation shows that theoverhead of computing higher-order SC rules on-the-fly is tolerable and attimes even improves the overall performance. Above that, completely newscenarios can be dealt with without the loss of information