Implementing HOTs that Generate Transformations with Two Input Models

Abstract

Model-driven Engineering (MDE) is a paradigmthat promotes the use of models and automatic model transfor-mations to handle complex software developments. Model trans-formations promise to reduce the effort for manipulating models.However, building transformations themselves is not easy. Higher-order Transformations (HOTs) are a means for automaticallybuilding model transformations. Building HOTs is in itself acomplex task mainly because there are no standard languagesfor implementing them, and there are not many HOTs availablein the literature to learn from. This situation is even worse whenmore sophisticated HOTs are required with two input models.We consider a real application to generate transformations fortailoring software process, because the generated transformationneeds to have two input models: the organizational process andthe project context model. In this paper, we show three differenttechniques for implementing this HOT and discuss their benefitsand limitations.