Comparison of Graph-Based Model Transformation Rules

With model transformations arising to primary development artifacts in Model-Driven Engineering, dedicated tools supporting transformation developers in the development and maintenance of model transfor- mations are strongly required. In this paper, we address the versioning of model transformations, which essentially relies on a basic service for comparing different versions of model transformations, e.g., a local workspace version and the latest version of a repository. Focusing on rule-based model transformations based on graph transformation concepts, we propose to compare such transformation rules using a maximum common subgraph (MCS) algorithm as the underlying matching engine. Although the MCS problem is known as a non-polynomial optimization problem, our research hypothesis is that using an MCS algorithm as a basis for comparing graph-based transformation rules is feasible for real-world model transformations and increases the quality of comparison results compared to standard model comparison algorithms. Experimental results obtained on a benchmark set for model transformation confirm this hypothesis.