Transformation from CIM to PIM : A feature-oriented component-based approach

Model Transformation is a crucial part of Model-Driven Architecture (MDA). However, most of the current researches only focus on the transformation from PIM to PSM, and pay little attention to the CIM-to-PIM transformation. One of the results is that converting CIM to PIM will depend much on designers' personal experience or creativity, and thus the quality of PIM can not be well controlled. This paper presents a feature-oriented component-based approach to the CIM-to-PIM transformation. In this approach, features and components are adopted as the key elements of CIM and PIM, respectively. One important characteristic of this approach is that it provides a method to decompose the n-to-n relations between features and components into two groups of 1-to-n relations. The other important characteristic is that this approach proposes a way to create components by clustering responsibilities which are operationalized from features. These two characteristics partially resolve two basic problems related to the CIM-to-PIM transformation: one is the traceability problem between CIM and PIM, the other is the problem of CIM-based PIM construction.