Formal Model-Driven Engineering: Generating Data and Behavioural Components

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how formal methods can verify the correctness of model transformations in model-driven engineering, specifically for generating database components from object models using SQL.

Contribution

It introduces a formal approach to ensure correctness of model transformations from object models to SQL, enhancing reliability in model-driven engineering.

Findings

Formal semantics for object models and SQL are defined.

Transformations are proven semantics-preserving.

Ensures correctness of generated database components.

Abstract

Model-driven engineering is the automatic production of software artefacts from abstract models of structure and functionality. By targeting a specific class of system, it is possible to automate aspects of the development process, using model transformations and code generators that encode domain knowledge and implementation strategies. Using this approach, questions of correctness for a complex, software system may be answered through analysis of abstract models of lower complexity, under the assumption that the transformations and generators employed are themselves correct. This paper shows how formal techniques can be used to establish the correctness of model transformations used in the generation of software components from precise object models. The source language is based upon existing, formal techniques; the target language is the widely-used SQL notation for database programming. Correctness is established by giving comparable, relational semantics to both languages, and checking that the transformations are semantics-preserving.