Grammar-based model transformations

Model transformation is a key concept in model-driven software engineering. The definition of model transformations is usually based on meta-models describing the abstract syntax of languages. While meta-models are thereby able to abstract from superfluous details of concrete syntax, they often loose structural information inherent in languages, like information on model elements always occurring together in particular shapes. As a consequence, model transformations cannot naturally re-use language structures, thus leading to unnecessary complexity in their development as well as analysis. In this paper, we propose a new approach to model transformation development which allows to simplify and improve the quality of the developed transformations via the exploitation of the languages' structures. The approach is based on context-free grammars and transformations defined by pairing productions of source and target grammars. We show that such transformations exhibit three important characteristics: they are sound, complete and deterministic.