M. Fleck, J. Troya, M. Wimmer: Marrying Search-based Optimization and Model Transformation Technology, First North American Search Based Software Engineering Symposium, Michigan; 26.02.2015 - 27.02.2015, in Proceedings of the First North American Search Based Software Engineering Symposium, Elsevier, (2015), pages 1 - 16. pdf
Model transformations are an important cornerstone of model-driven engineering. Thus, various model transformationlanguages have been proposed, most of which follow the rule-based paradigm. The application of transformation rulesis realized either following the apply-as-long-as-possible strategy or an orchestration of the rules has to be provided.However, two main limitations arise from following these two approaches. First, the goals of the transformations areimplicitly hidden in the rule encoding and their orchestration specifications. Second, manually finding the best ruleorchestration for a particular scenario is a complex problem due to the high number of rule combination possibilities.To tackle these limitations, we present in this paper a novel framework which builds on the non-intrusive integrationof optimization and model transformation technology. This integration allows for search-based exploration of ruleapplications and to make the goals of transformations explicit. In particular, we formulate the rule application problemas an optimization problem. The proposed framework provides several algorithms for local and global searches of ruleapplications guided by single and multiple objectives expressed in terms of models. We present different instantiationsof our framework to demonstrate its feasibility and benefits by several case studies in the field of software engineering.