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Surveying Rule Inheritance in Model-to-Model Transformation Languages

<08>Over the last two decades, a number of declarative and hybrid

rule-based model-to-model transformation languages have been developed

by different research groups in the field of Model-Driven Engineering.

As the adoption of Model-Driven Engineering and the size and

complexity of model transformations have grown, the need for reuse and

extensibility mechanisms, and in particular for a solid rule

inheritance model, in model transformation languages has become

imperative. As the majority of transformation languages have been

developed in isolation, different research groups have opted for

different rule inheritance models, often without providing an explicit

justification of the design and implementation decisions made. This

survey paper reviews more than 40 related publications, provides an

in-depth critique of the rule inheritance models supported by the most

widely-used rule-based model transformation languages, and introduces

formally expressed comparison criteria that enable different rule

inheritance models to be directly compared with each other. The paper

has validated the proposed comparison framework by applying it in the

context of a comprehensive analysis of these transformation languages,

and has uncovered substantial flaws and limitations in all of them.

The findings of this paper have attracted significant attention in the

community and have triggered additional research and allocation of

development effort aimed at remedying the identified flaws.