Formal verification of model transformations: An automated framework

Abstract

Verification of models and model processing programs are inevitable in real world model-based software development. Model transformation developers are often interested in offline verification methods, when only the definition of the model transformation and the specification of the source and target languages are used to analyze the properties and no concrete input models are taken into account. Therefore, the results of the analysis hold for each output model not just particular ones, and we have to perform the analysis only once. Most often, formal verification of model transformations is performed manually or the methods can be applied only for a certain transformation or for the analysis of only a certain property. Previous work has presented formal and algorithmic background for a possible verification framework. Based on this background, this paper introduces a realization of an automated verification framework for graph rewriting-based model transformations. We illustrate the operation of the framework and demonstrate its applicability on a case study. Our goal is to further improve our approach in order to be able to be applied in more complex industrial solutions as well.