Model Transformations for Migrating Legacy Models: An Industrial Case Study

Many companies in the automotive industry have adopted MDD in their vehicle control software development. As a major automotive company, General Motors has been using a custom-built, domain-specific modeling language, implemented as an internal proprietary metamodel, to meet the modeling needs in its control software development. As AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) is being developed as a standard to ease the process of integrating components provided by different suppliers and manufacturers, there is a growing demand to migrate these GM-specific, legacy models to AUTOSAR models. Given that AUTOSAR defines its own metamodel for various system artifacts in automotive software development, we explore using model transformations to address the challenges in migrating GM legacy models to their AUTOSAR equivalents. As a case study, we have built a model transformation using the MDWorkbench tool and the Atlas Transformation Language (ATL). This paper reports on the case study, makes observations based on our experience to assist in the development of similar types of transformations, and provides recommendations for further research.