The current release of VIATRA provides open-source tool support for an event-driven, reactive model transformation engine built on top of highly scalable incremental graph queries for models with millions of elements and advanced features such as rule-based design space exploration complex event processing or model obfuscation. However, the history of the VIATRA model transformation framework dates back to over 16 years. Starting as an early academic research prototype as part of the M.Sc project of the the first author it first evolved into a Prolog-based engine followed by a family of open-source projects which by now matured into a component integrated into various industrial and open-source tools and deployed over multiple technologies. This invited paper briefly overviews the evolution of the VIATRA/IncQuery family by highlighting key features and illustrating main transformation concepts along an open case study influenced by an industrial project.

Model transformations are frequently used means for automating software development in various domains to improve quality and reduce production costs. Debugging of model transformations often necessitates identifying parts of the transformation program and the transformed models which have causal dependence on a selected statement. In traditional programming environments, program slicing techniques are widely used to calculate control and data dependencies between the statements of the program. Here, we introduce program slicing for model transformations where the main challenge is to simultaneously assess data and control dependencies over the transformation program and the underlying models of the transformation. In this paper, we present a dynamic backward slicing approach for both model transformation programs and their transformed models based on automatically generated execution trace models of transformations. We evaluate our approach using different transformation case studies.

Model-driven development tools built on industry standard platforms, such as the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), heavily use model queries in various use cases, such as model transformation, well-formedness constraint validation and domain-specific model execution. As these queries are executed rather frequently in interactive modeling applications, they have a significant impact on the runtime performance of the tool, and also on the end user experience. However, due to their complexity, they can be time consuming to implement and optimize on a case-by-case basis. To address these shortcomings, we developed the EMF-INCQUERY framework for defining declarative queries over EMF models and executing them effectively using a caching mechanism. In the current paper, we demonstrate how our framework can be easily integrated with other EMF tools. We describe a case study in which EMF-INCQUERY is integrated into the open source Papyrus UML environment to provide on-the-fly validation of well-formedness criteria in UML models.

Model transformations are frequently used means for automating software development in various domains to improve quality and reduce production costs. Debugging of model transformations often necessitates identifying parts of the transformation program and the transformed models that have causal dependence on a selected statement. In traditional programming environments, program slicing techniques are widely used to calculate control and data dependencies between the statements of the program. Here we introduce program slicing for model transformations where the main challenge is to simultaneously assess data and control dependencies over the transformation program and the underlying models of the transformation. In this paper, we present a dynamic backward slicing approach for both model transformation programs and their transformed models based on automatically generated execution trace models of transformations.