The BiG Project

Model transformations are a key element in the OMG's Model Driven Development agenda, providing a standard way to represent and transform software artifacts such as requirements, design models, program code, tests, configuration files, and documentation in software development. However, after a transformation is applied, the source and the target models usually co-exist and evolve independently. How to propagate modifications correctly across models in different formats and guarantee system consistency remains an open problem.

The aim of this project is to solve this problem by proposing a linguistic framework for bidirectional model transformations. The framework includes (1) a new model transformation language with clear bidirectional semantics, being equipped with a powerful bidirectionality inference mechanism and a virtual machine on which bidirectional model transformation can be efficiently realized; (2) an environment for supporting programming, debugging and maintaining bidirectional model transformations; and (3) a set of application examples and domain-specific libraries that can be used in practice.

The success of the project would lead to a new standard for bidirectional model transformations, a novel formal method for evolutionary software development, and a trusty tool for artifact synchronization.

Acknowledgments: Our research is supported by the GRACE Center as one of its projects, the Grand-Challenging Project Program of National Institute of Informatics, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60528006, the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) No. 20500043, and Encouragement of Young Scientists (B) of the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research No. 20700035.

REMARK: BiG stands for Bidirectional Graph Transformation.