Attributed graph transformation with inheritance: Efficient conflict detection and local confluence analysis using abstract critical pairs

Inheritance is an important and widely spread concept enabling the elegant expression of hierarchy in object-oriented software programs or models. It has been defined for graphs and graph transformations enhancing the applicability of this formal technique. Up to now, for the analysis of transformations with inheritance a flattening construction has been used, which yields all the well-known results for graph transformation but results in a large number of graphs and rules that have to be analyzed. In this paper, we introduce a new category of typed attributed graphs with inheritance. For the detection of conflicts between graph transformations on these graphs, the notion of abstract critical pairs is defined. This allows us to perform the analysis on polymorphic rules and transformations without the need for flattening, which significantly increases the efficiency of the analysis and eases the interpretation of the analysis results. The new main result is the Local Confluence Theorem for typed attributed graph transformation with inheritance using abstract critical pairs. All constructions and results are demonstrated on an example for the analysis of refactorings. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.