Towards the Automatic Verification of Behavior Preservation at the Transformation Level for Operational Model Transformations

The correctness of model transformations and, in particular, behavior preservation is important for model-driven engineering of high quality software. Behavior preservation verification techniques have been presented with automatic tool support for the instance level, i.e. for a given source and target model specified by the model transformation. However, up until now there is no automatic verification approach available for operational model transformations at the transformation level, i.e. for all source and target models specified by an operational model transformation. In this paper, we outline a first approach towards the automatic verification of behavior preservation for operational model transformations at the transformation level extending our previous results for relational model transformations. In particular, we show that in restricted cases the behavior preservation problem for an operational model transformation can be reduced to invariant checking for graph transformation with priorities illustrated by a simple example.