Executing a Standard Compliant Transformation Model on a Non-standard Platform

Model-driven engineering is a software development method to model applications at a high level of abstraction and introduce platform specific details automatically using model transformations. Similarly, models specified in human-readable languages can be mapped automatically onto languages that support the analysis of formal properties. In an industrial context, the transformations that automate such mappings should be able to consume input models from various commercial tools. Unfortunately, such tools tend to store models in slightly different ways, not fully compliant to standards. Additional techniques are necessary to develop transformations in a platform independent manner instead of specific ones for each modeling tool. This paper illustrates such techniques on an example related to the transformation of visual process models (UML activity diagrams) into low-level algebraic (CSP) programs that support formal verification. In turn, the platform independent and human-readable transformation model is translated into code that can transform UML inputs even when these are non-standard.