Call for Solutions

The 2016 Transformation Tool Contest (TTC) seeks your solutions to a challenging transformation problem, involving the production of high-quality designs for object-oriented systems. The deadline for solution descriptions is 9th May 2016, immediately followed by a round of open peer reviewing. As in previous editions, solution descriptions will be published in a post-proceedings volume, and potentially lead to continued collaboration for producing a per-case journal article.

About TTC

The aim of this event is to compare the expressiveness, the usability and the performance of graph, model and program transformation tools along a number of selected case studies. A deeper understanding of the relative merits of different tool features will help to further improve transformation tools and to indicate open problems.

This contest is the eighth of its kind (after an AGTiVE 2007 session, as GraBaTs 2008 and 2009 contests, and the TTC 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2015 contests). For the fouth time, the contest is co-located with several leading software engineering conferences as part of the Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations (STAF) federation. Teams from the major international research groups in the development and use of transformation tools are expected to participate in the TTC again.

Participating in the Contest

The following challenging case study have been selected:

The case description, supporting resources, and discussion between solution developers are hosted at the source code repositories linked to above. Please note that these repositories are in draft form until 8th April: you can expect to see some small changes to the cases until then.

If you would like to participate in the contest, you are now asked to choose one or more case studies, take your favourite transformation tool and submit your solutions. A submission should consist of a paper and the actual solution (i.e., programs, models, etc.). The paper should include a description of the chosen case study variant (if any) and a presentation of the chosen solution, including a discussion of design decisions. Examples can be explored at the TTC 2015 website.

Solutions should be submitted via Easychair by 9th May 2016. Before the same deadline, each case study solution (tool, project files, documentation) should be made available for review and demonstration via SHARE (please contact the chairs if you want to distribute your solution in an alternative way). Wherever possible, solution source code should be made available in a public repository on a popular source forge (e.g. Github or Bitbucket). For submissions via Easychair, sign-up and instructions to SHARE, please visit:

Immediately after the submission deadline, please note solution developers will be asked to participate in a round of open review of other solutions. Therefore, we ask that all solution developers are available in the period 10th May to 25th May 2016 to participate in these discussions.

Please note that solutions that are ultimately published in the post-proceedings will not exceed 5 pages and will be formatted using the CEUR-WS style. There are no such page limit or formatting restrictions on the initial descriptions of a solution (i.e., the solutions submitted on 9th May).

Besides the presentations of the submitted solutions, the contest held on the 8th July 2016 in Vienna (Austria) will comprise a live contest: an additional transformation case that will not be announced until a few days before the contest. There will be dedicated hackspace during the week of STAF for solution developers wishing to work on the live contest.

Publication Procedure

For TTC 2016 there will be several publication opportunities:

  • The informal pre-proceedings will appear on the TTC website. They contain the descriptions of the accepted cases and all the solution papers.
  • After the contest there will be more formal contest proceedings. Solution submitters have to consider and address the opponents' statements. The resulting solution papers will be reviewed by the TTC program committee. A selection of revised solution papers together with the case descriptions will be published in the contest proceedings which are currently planned to appear in WS-CEUR.
  • Past editions of TTC have often resulted in one journal publication per case. Those articles have introduced the case and compare the solutions from a high-level perspective. Also the results of the evaluation sheets filled in during the contest were considered. These articles were compiled and edited by the case submitters together with the contest organizers. We anticipate interest in similar efforts following the 2016 edition of the contest.