lecturer: Tom Mens
Model-driven engineering (MDE) is an approach to software development where the primary focus is on models, as opposed to source code. The use of models opens up new possibilities for creating, analyzing, manipulating and formally reasoning about systems at a high level of abstraction. To reap all the benefits of MDE, it is essential to install a mechanism of model transformation, that enables a wide range of different automated activities such as translation of models (expressed in different modeling languages), generating code from models, model refinement, model synthesis or model extraction, model restructuring, model improvement and model refactoring. To achieve this, languages, formalisms, techniques and tools that support model transformation are needed. In this talk, we will attempt to survey the state-of-the-art on model transformation, give some concrete examples on how model transformation can be realised and formalised, and show how it can be used to support some essential activities in MDE.