MICE: Model TransformatIon PerformanCe Engineering

One option to handle the continuous growth of the complexity of software systems is Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) which uses models as key artifacts. An essential operation on these models are model transformations which translate an input model into an output model. They are specified in transformation scripts executed by transformation engines at design time and at run time. For this the performance of transformations is an important aspect which needs to be considered. Today the current research focuses on optimizing the engines internally and transformation engineers are not supported in improving the transformation scripts themselves.

The project Model TransformatIon PerformanCe Engineering (MICE) addresses this issue by developing a method for performance engineering of model transformations. This method will enable the transformation engineer to systematically identify and visualize causes for performance issues as well as predict and improve the performance of model transformations. For this the software performance engineering (SPE) and worst case execution time (WCET) methods have to be adapted and specialized for model transformations by identifying and modeling the key impact factors of transformation scripts on performance. In addition monitoring and profiling approaches and their visualizations need to take features like transformation engine heuristics into account to become useful.

To ensure the generalizability the results are applied to the two transformation languages Henshin and QVTo. In addition we focus on the three different, following demonstrators: a common forward engineering model transformation at design time, self-adaptive cloud systems with soft real-time requirements and self-adaptive quadrocopter swarms with hard-real-time requirements.

This project is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) - Ti 803/4-1.

Publications

2023

9.
Groner, Raffaela; Bellmann, Peter; Höppner, Stefan; Thiam, Patrick; Schwenker, Friedhelm; Tichy, Matthias
Predicting the Performance of ATL Model Transformations
Proceedings of the 2023 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering
April 2023
DOI:10.1145/3578244.3583727

2022

8.
Groner, Raffaela; Juhnke, Katharina; Höppner, Stefan; Tichy, Matthias; Becker, Steffen; Vijayshree, Vijayshree; Frank, Sebastian
A Survey on the Relevance of the Performance of Model Transformations (extended abstract)
Software Engineering (SE) 2022
2022
DOI:10.18420/se2022-ws-008

2021

7.
Groner, Raffaela; Beaucamp, Luis; Tichy, Matthias; Becker, Steffen
An Exploratory Study on Performance Engineering in Model Transformations (extended abstract)
Software Engineering (SE) 2021
February 2021
DOI:10.18420/SE2021_14
6.
Groner, Raffaela; Juhnke, Katharina; Götz, Stefan; Tichy, Matthias; Becker, Steffen; Vijayshree, Vijayshree; Frank, Sebastian
A Survey on the Relevance of the Performance of Model Transformations
Journal of Object Technology
2021
DOI:10.5381/jot.2021.20.2.a5

2020

5.
Groner, Raffaela; Gylstorff, Sophie; Tichy, Matthias
A Profiler for the Matching Process of Henshin
Tool Demonstration. In ACM/IEEE 23rd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS ’20 Companion), October 18–23, 2020, Virtual Event, Canada.
October 2020
DOI:10.1145/3417990.3422000
4.
Groner, Raffaela; Beaucamp, Luis; Tichy, Matthias; Becker, Steffen
An Exploratory Study on Performance Engineering in Model Transformations
In ACM/IEEE 23rd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS ’20), October 18–23, 2020, Virtual Event, Canada.
October 2020
DOI:10.1145/3365438.3410950

2019

3.
Groner, Raffaela
User-Centered Performance Engineering of Model Transformations
ACM/IEEE 22nd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C), Doctoral Symposium, Munich, Germany
September 2019
DOI:10.1109/MODELS-C.2019.00097

2018

2.
Groner, Raffaela; Gylstorff, Sophie; Tichy, Matthias
Monitoring the Execution of Declarative Model Transformations
9th Symposium on Software Performance, Hildesheim, Germany
November 2018
File:pdfhttps://www.performance-symposium.org/fileadmin/user_upload/palladio-conference/2018/papers/GronerGylstorffTichy.pdf
1.
Groner, Raffaela; Tichy, Matthias; Becker, Steffen
Towards Performance Engineering of Model Transformation
9th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2018), Berlin, Germany
April 2018
DOI:10.1145/3185768.3186305
File:https://doi.org/10.1145/3185768.3186305