Termination Criteria for Model Transformation

Nowadays the usage of model transformations in software engineering has become widespread. Considering current trends in software development such as model driven development (MDD), there is an emerging need to develop model manipulations such as model evolution and optimisation, semantics definition, etc. If a model transformation is described in a precise way, it can be analysed lateron. Models, especially visual models, can be described best by graphs, due to their multi-dimensional extension. Graphs can be manipulated by graph transformation in a rule-based manner. Thus, we specify model transformation by graph transformation. This approach offers visual and formal techniques in such a way that model transformations can be subjects to analysis. Various results on graph transformation can be used to prove important properties of model transformations such as its functional behaviour, a basic property for computations. Moreover, certain kinds of syntactical and semantical consistency properties can be shown on this formal basis.