Automated Formal Verification of Model Tranformations

As the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) relies on complex and highly automated model transformations between arbitrary modeling languages, the quality of such transformations is of immense importance as it can easily become a bottleneck of a model-driven design process. Automation surely increases the quality of such transformations as errors manually implanted into transformation programs during implementation are eliminated; however, conceptual flaws in transformation design still remain undetected. In this paper, we present a metalevel and highly automated technique to formally verify by model checking that a model transformation from an arbitrary well-formed model instance of the source modeling language into its target equivalent preserves (language specific) dynamic consistency properties. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on a complex mathematical model transformation from UML statecharts to Petri nets.