Automated reuse of model transformations through typing requirements models

Model transformations are key elements of model-driven engineering, where they are used to automate the manipulation of models. However, they are typed with respect to concrete source and target meta-models, making their reuse for other (even similar) meta-models challenging. To improve this situation, we propose capturing the typing requirements for reusing a transformation with other meta-models by the notion of a typing requirements model (TRM). A TRM describes the prerequisites that amodel transformation imposes on the source and targetmeta-models to obtain a correct typing. The key observation is that any meta-model pair that satisfies the TRM is a valid reuse context for the transformation at hand. A TRM is made of two domain requirement models (DRMs) describing the requirements for the source and target meta-models, and a compatibility model expressing dependencies between them. We define a notion of refinement between DRMs and see meta-models as a special case of DRM. We provide a catalogue of valid refinements and describe how to automatically extract a TRM from an ATL transformation. The approach is supported by our tool TOTEM. We report on two experiments-based on transformations developed by third parties and meta-model mutation techniques-validating the correctness and completeness of our TRM extraction procedure and confirming the power of TRMs to encode variability and support flexible reuseWork partially funded by the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (project FORTE, S2018/TCS4314), the Spanish Ministry of Science (project MASSIVE, RTI2018-095255-B-I00), the Spanish MINECO(project RECOM, TIN2015-73968-JIN, AEI/FEDER/UE), a Ramón y Cajal 2017 grant, and the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme through the Polyglot and Hybrid Persistence Architectures for Big Data Analytics (TYPHON) project (#780251