Defining and validating transformations of UML models

With the success of the UML, the ability of transforming models into programs or formal specifications becomes a key to automated code generation or verification in the software development process. In this paper, we describe a concept for specifying model transformations by means of graph transformation rules on the UML meta model. In order to validate the termination and uniqueness of such transformations, we derive a number of sufficient criteria from basic results of the theory of graph transformation. This ensures that the rules can be executed automatically while, at the same time, providing a high-level visual model of the transformation.