A Formalism for Automated Verification of Model Transformations

Verification of models and model processing programs are fundamental issues and are inevitable in model-based software development in order to apply them in realworld solutions. Verification concerns the analysis of non-functional and functional properties as well. Model transformation developers are interested in offline methods for the verification process. Offline analysis means that only the definition of the model transformation and the metmodels of the source and target languages are used to analyze the properties and no concrete input models are taken into account. Therefore, the results of the analysis hold for each output model not just particular ones, and we have to perform the analysis only once. Most often, formal verification of model transformations is performed manually, but automated or semi-automated approaches have gained focus recently. We have previously presented a method to formally describe the main characteristics of model transformations. Our concept consists of two steps: (i) The automatic generation of a formal description from a concrete transformation, which is manually extended by formal assertions by transformation experts. (ii) A reasoning system is used to automatically derive the proof of certain properties from the previous formal description. In this paper, we show how deduction rules of the reasoning system can be defined.