Trace-based approach to editability and correspondence analysis for bidirectional graph transformations

Bidirectional graph transformation is expected to play an important role in model-driven software engineering where artifacts are often refined through compositions of model transformations, by propagating changes in the artifacts over transformations bidirectionally. However, it is often difficult to understand the correspondence among elements of the artifacts. The connections view elements have among each other and with source elements, which lead to restrictions of view editability, and parts of the transformation which are responsible for these relations, are not apparent to the user of a bidirectional transformation program. These issues are critical for more complex transformations. In this paper, we propose an approach to analyzing the above correspondence as well as to classifying edges according to their editability on the target, in a compositional framework of bidirectional graph transformation where the target of a graph transformation can be the source of another graph transformation. These are achieved by augmenting the forward semantics of the transformations with explicit correspondence traces. By leveraging this approach, it is possible to solve the above issues, without executing the entire backward transformation.