GrGen.NET: A Fast, Expressive, and General Purpose Graph Rewrite Tool

Abstract

Introduction GrGen.NET is a graph rewrite tool enabling elegant and convenient development of graph transformation applications with comparable performance to manually developed ones. GrGen.NET compiles declarative specifications of graph meta models, patterns, and rewrite rules into .NET modules. The entire functionality (meta-model, matching, rewriting, elementary graph operations) is accessible through a convenient API (called libGr) enabling easy integration of GrGen.NET into custom applications. Meta-model and rule languages have formal semantics based on a new combination of category theory and denotational semantics [1].The general purpose graph rewrite tool GrGen.NET is a descendant of GrGen [2], initially developed for transformations in compiler construction [3]. GrGen.NET is published under LGPL along with a user manual.

Autonomous Units for Solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem Based on Ant Colony Optimization

“…e.g. (Ermel et al 1999) and (Geiß and Kroll 2008)) facilitate the visual simulation of ant colonies in a straightforward way (see also (Hölscher 2008)).  Implementing ACO algorithms with graph transformational systems is useful for verification purposes, i.e., to check whether the algorithms behave properly for specific cases.…”

“… The graph-and rule-based representation allows to visualize and specify the ant colony optimization algorithms more naturally and can help to gain a better understanding of the algorithm. Furthermore, there exist tools that are suitable to provide an implementation platform for communities of autonomous units; in particular, in (Hölscher 2008) it is shown how an algorithm based on autonomous units can be implemented with the tool GrGEN (Geiß and Kroll 2008) for finding shortest paths in graphs.  Communities of autonomous units are suitable to integrate autonomous control into the model of the logistic processes and algorithms (cf.…”

An Evolutionary Graph Transformation System as a Modelling Framework for Evolutionary Algorithms

“…Besides further theoretical investigation, this and other case studies should be implemented with one of the existing graph transformation system, e.g. GrGen ( [7]) to gain some benchmarks and to prove the practical usefulness of modelling evolutionary algorithms with evolutionary graph transformation systems. …”

Transformation of UML Models to CSP: A Case Study for Graph Transformation Tools

“…As GrGen.NET provides all the necessary primitives, the UML and CSP meta models can be expressed directly (see [13]). Especially the ActivityEdge can be modeled by an edge type (as opposed to nodes in the given UML meta model) because the type system allows attributed edges.…”