A formal approach to modeling and model transformations in software engineering

Abstract

A software model is an abstract representa- tion of a softwaresystem which can be used to describe, at a higher abstraction level, different aspects of of the software system. Since the beginning of computer science, raising the abstracting level of software systems has been a continuous goal for many computer scientists. this ha lead to the usage of models and model languages in software development processes. Currently in addition to documentation purposes, models are increasingly used to automati- cally generate and integrate parts of the systems that they describe.As a consequence, there is a need for formal modeling languages and formal transformation definition techniques which can be employed to automatically translate between (and integrate) models. Therefore, a major focus of our research is on the formalization of modeling and model transforamtion in the generic formalism. Diagrammatic Predicate Logic (DPL). This paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art ofour ongoing research on analysis of modeling and model transforamtions based on the DPL framework.