In Model Driven Engineering (MDE), models are first-class citizens, and model transformation is MDE's "heart and soul" [1]. Since model transformations are executed for a family of conforming models, their validity becomes a crucial issue. This paper proposes to explore the question of the formal verification of model transformation properties through a tri-dimensional approach: the transformation involved, the properties of interest addressed, and the formal verification techniques used to establish the properties. This work allows a better understanding of the expected properties for a particular transformation, and facilitates the identification of the suitable tools and techniques for enabling their verification.
Abstract. We extend a previously proposed symbolic model transformation property prover for the DSLTrans transformation language. The original prover generated the set of path conditions (i.e., symbolic transformation executions), and verified atomic contracts (constraints on inputoutput model relations) on these path conditions. The prover evaluated atomic contracts to yield either true or false for the transformation when run on any input model. In this paper we extend the prover such that it can verify atomic contracts and more complex properties composed of atomic contracts. Besides demonstrating our prover on a simple transformation, we use it to verify different kinds of properties of an industrial transformation. Experiments on this transformation using our prover show a speed-up in verification run-time by two orders of magnitude over another verification tool that we evaluated in previous research.
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