Principles for System Prototype and Verification Using Metamodel Based Transformations

Using domain specific modeling (DSM) allows solutions to be expressed in the idiom and at the level of abstraction of the problem domain. However, this does not imply that prototypes can be easily and rapidly generated. In reality, domain specific languages (DSLs) are difficult to design, implement and maintain, and usually there is a potential loss of efficiency when compared with hand-coded software. In this paper we explain the principles based on which we expect to solve some of these problems by means of transformation from a DSL to a formalism with a well define semantics named concurrent object oriented Petri-nets (CO-OPN). The proposed methodology uses the metamodel of the DSL as the principle for the transformation. This transformation represents the semantic mapping between the DSL and CO-OPN. The achievement is both to provide a formally defined semantics to the DSL and, since CO-OPN is integrated in a framework, to provide the functionalities that allow model verification and fast prototype generation for the DSL