VICToRy: Visual Interactive Consistency Management in Tolerant Rule-based Systems
This work aims to improve the understandability and controllability of consistency management operations for users of Model-Driven Engineering tools, which is an incremental improvement.
This paper addresses the lack of understandability and controllability in consistency management tools in Model-Driven Engineering. It introduces VICToRy, a debugger for model generation and transformation based on Triple Graph Grammars, which provides fine-grained, step-by-step interactive visualization and allows users to explore and choose between multiple valid rule applications.
In the field of Model-Driven Engineering, there exist numerous tools that support various consistency management operations including model transformation, synchronisation and consistency checking. The supported operations, however, typically run completely in the background with only input and output made visible to the user. We argue that this often reduces both understandability and controllability. As a step towards improving this situation, we present VICToRy, a debugger for model generation and transformation based on Triple Graph Grammars, a well-known rule-based approach to bidirectional transformation. In addition to a fine-grained, step-by-step, interactive visualisation, VICToRy enables the user to actively explore and choose between multiple valid rule applications thus improving control and understanding.