Contribution to the Analysis of the Design-Space of a Distributed Transformation Engine
SR1 – Monday January 23, 2023, 14h
The design space for defining a distributed model transformation engine is a large spectrum of possibilities and opportunities to enhance performances in terms of computation time and memory consumption. Depending on the adopted decisions, the use of a transformation engine can be completely different (e.g., an incremental solution for an often-modified model vs a formally specified engine for reasoning, not performing). Already existing solutions propose engines with different goals based on several approaches including distribution, laziness, incrementality, and correctness. However, comparing the solutions is not trivial, and does not necessarily make sense. That is why we have implemented a new engine, integrating variability, that allows an analysis of its design space. From a language that has formal specifications, we created SparkTE, a parametrizable and distributed transformation engine on top of Spark. In this thesis, we aim at analysing the impact of the choices at different levels: the used programming models for defining expressions; the different semantics used to define the computation of a transformation; and the impact of engineering choices.