Tool Integration with Triple Graph Grammars - A Survey

Nowadays, typical software and system engineering projects in various industrial sectors (automotive, telecommunication, etc.) involve hundreds of developers using quite a number of different tools. Thus, the data of a project as a whole is distributed over these tools. Therefore, it is necessary to make the relationships of different tool data repositories visible and keep them consistent with each other. This still is a nightmare due to the lack of domain-specific adaptable tool and data integration solutions which support maintenance of traceability links, semi-automatic consistency checking as well as update propagation. Currently used solutions are usually hand-coded one-way transformations between pairs of tools. In this article we present a rule-based approach that allows for the declarative specification of data integration rules. It is based on the formalism of triple graph grammars and uses directed graphs to represent MOF-compliant (meta) models. As a result we give an answer to OMG's request for proposals for a MOF-compliant “queries, views, and transformation” (QVT) approach from the “model driven application development” (MDA) field.