Towards Safe Model Transformation for Constraint-driven Modeling

Model transformation is a key technology in model-driven engineering. Unfortunately, transformations are typically written manually and thus they are likely to contain errors and to produce incorrect or undesired output. Safe transformation is the guarantee that for every possible source model, the transformed target model is valid with respect to user-definable well-formedness criteria. This paper introduces safe transformation for constraint-driven modeling (CDM), an approach that employs model transformation to generate target model constraints instead of generating a target model directly. Safe transformation for CDM ensures that transformations only produce correct and non-contradictory constraints. We demonstrate the feasibility of safe transformation and present a formal framework for applying it to CDM in arbitrary domains.