Using Meta-code Generation to Realize Higher-order Model Transformations

Abstract: Model-driven engineering is a wide-spread paradigm in modern software engineering. During the last couple of years, many tools and languages have been developed, which are especially designed for model transfor-mations — a discipline which is needed in many model-driven engineering approaches. While most of the existing model-to-model tools and languages are tailored towards batch transformations for specific model in-stances, they lack support for generic transformation problems, where the metamodel is unknown beforehand. In this paper we present a two-step meta-code generation approach that derives a metamodel-specific model-to-model transformation from a model-to-text transformation. The approach has been successfully applied to the problem of product derivation in model-driven software product lines. 1