Realizing Model Transformation Chain interoperability

A single Model Transformation Chain (MTC) takes a high-level input model rooted in the problem domain and through one or more transformation steps produces a low-level output model rooted in the solution domain. To build a single "almighty" MTC that is in charge of every design, implementation and specific platform concern is a complex task. Instead, we can use several smaller MTCs that are easier to develop and maintain, because each MTC is independently developed focusing on a specific concern. However, the MTCs must interoperate to produce complete applications; this inherently creates dependencies between them, because each MTC generates a part of the final low- level model. In this paper, we propose an external and explicit mechanism to track dependencies between the MTCs (i.e., the MTCs are oblivious to the mechanism), which is used to automatically derive correspondence relationships between the final models generated by each MTC. The contribution of our mechanism is the reduction of complexity of building interoperable MTCs because the derived correspondences.