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5 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
WORK
Higher-order transformations have just recently been
addressed in model-driven software development
(Tisi et al., 2010). As a consequence, there is no
sufficient tool support available at the moment. In
our paper, we presented a novel approach to bridge
this gap by a two-step meta-code generation approach
which enables the specification of a higher-order en-
dogenous model transformation that is independent
from the concrete metamodel. Only at runtime, ATL
code is generated for the specific metamodel using an
Acceleo template, and the resulting first-order ATL
transformation is then performed on corresponding
model instances.
We applied our approach to the problem of prod-
uct derivation in model-driven software product lines,
where we could successfully test its correctness by
comparing results to the existing, Java-based solution.
The meta-transformation code we had to write is sig-
nificantly more declarative. Furthermore, the Acceleo
template comprises 124 lines of code, which is about
a third of the original Java source code (370 lines).
For future work, we plan to transfer our approach
to another research project which is dedicated to
three-way merging of models (Westfechtel, 2012) and
has a problem definition similar to the one described
in this paper. The algorithm allows merging of arbi-
trary Ecore model instances. The main differences
are that first, the result is not only obtained by a
conditional copy of one, but three input models, and
second, filtering of artifacts is replaced by dedicated
merge rules.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors want to thank Bernhard Westfechtel for
his valuable comments on the draft of this paper.
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