Applying Model Transformation By-Example on Business Process Modeling Languages

Model transformations are playing a vital role in the field of model engineering. However, for non-trivial transformation issues most approaches require imperative definitions, which are cumbersome and error-prone to create. Therefore, Model Transformation By Example (MTBE) approaches have been proposed as user-friendly alternative that simplifies the definition of model transformations. Up to now, MTBE approaches have been applied to structural models, only. In this work we apply MTBE to the domain of business process modeling languages, i.e., Event-driven Process Chains and UML activity diagrams. Compared to structural languages, business process modeling languages cover static semantic constraints, which are not specified in the metamodel. As a consequence, reasoning on the abstract syntax level is not sufficient. The contribution of this paper is to extend our existing MTBE approach by new alignment operators on the user level, which further improves the transparency of model transformation code. Concrete syntax and the knowledge about mapping operators are to be the only requisite artifacts.