Incremental execution of model-to-text transformations using property access traces

Automatic generation of textual artefacts (including code, documentation, configuration files, build scripts, etc.) from models in a software development process through the application of model-to-text (M2T) transformation is a common MDE activity. Despite the importance of M2T transformation, contemporary M2T languages lack support for developing transformations that scale with the size of the input model. As MDE is applied to systems of increasing size and complexity, a lack of scalability in M2T transformation languages hinders industrial adoption. In this paper, we propose a form of runtime analysis that can be used to identify the impact of source model changes on generated textual artefacts. The structures produced by this runtime analysis, property access traces, can be used to perform efficient source-incremental transformation: our experiments show an average reduction of 60% in transformation execution time compared to non-incremental (batch) transformation.