Model Driven Development Transformations using Inductive Logic Programming

Model transformation by example is a novel approach in model-driven software engineering. The rationale behind the approach is to derive transformation rules from an initial set of interrelated source and target models; e.g., requirements analysis and software design models. The derived rules describe different transformation steps in a purely declarative way. Inductive Logic Programming utilizes the power of machine learning and the capability of logic programming to induce valid hypotheses from given examples. In this paper, we use Inductive Logic Programming to derive transformation rules from given examples of analysis-design pairs. As a proof concept, we applied the approach to two major software design tasks: class packaging and introducing Facade design. Various analysis-design model pairs collected from different sources were used as case studies. The resultant performance measures show that the approach is promising.