Improved traceability for bidirectional model transformations

Conventional wisdom on bidirectionality in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) suggests that it represents a crucial component to achieve superior model management, whether it be round-tripping, synchronisation, or consistency restoration. Despite their relevance, bidirectional transformations remain difficult to design and implement due to the complexity they must usually encode and their semantic intricacy. Using a proper traceability support enables transformations to be persistent and permits designers to deal with such cases that would be otherwise largely unfeasible. This also implies dealing with the different types of model relationships that may exist in order to establish (re)usable traceability links. This paper proposes to leverage traceability information between source and target elements of a transformation to a first-class status in order to i) automa-tise its generation, ii) enable a model-based representation and iii) ease reuse and refinement in a further stage. The approach is realized within the JTL framework.