Model-Driven Program Transformation of a Large Avionics Framework

Model-driven approaches to software development, when coupled with a domain-specific visual language, assist in capturing the essence of a large system in a notation that is familiar to a domain expert. From a high-level domain-specific model, it is possible to describe concisely the configuration features that a system must possess, in addition to checking that the model preserves semantic properties of the domain. With respect to large legacy applications written in disparate programming languages, the primary problem of transformation is the difficulty of adapting the legacy source to match the evolving features specified in the corresponding model. This paper presents an approach for uniting model-driven development with a mature program transformation engine. The paper describes a technique for performing widespread adaptation of source code from transformation rules that are generated from a domain-specific modeling environment for a large avionics framework.