An MDE-based method for bridging different design notations

Different communities have developed plenty of design notations for software engineering in support of practical (via UML) and rigorous (via formal methods) approaches. Hence the problem of bridging these notations rises. Model-driven engineering (MDE) is a new paradigm in software engineering, which treats models and model transformations as first class citizens. Furthermore, it is seen as a promising method for bridging heterogeneous platforms. In this paper, we provide an MDE-based approach to build bridges between informal, semi-formal and formal notations: Firstly, different notations are viewed as different domain specification languages (DSLs) and introduced into MDE, especially into the ATLAS Model Management Architecture (AMMA) platform, by metamodeling. Then, ATL transformation rules are built for semantics mapping. At last, TCS-based model-to-text syntax rules are developed, allowing one to map models to programs. Consequently, different design notations in both graphical style and grammatical style are bridged. A case study of bridging OMG SysML™ to LOTOS is also illustrated showing the validity and practicability of our approach.