EMF-Syncer solution to TTC'20 round-trip migration case

In this paper, we present a solution to the TTC'20 offline case Round-trip migration of object-oriented data model instances [1]. This case involves the application of maintenance tasks to web APIs that are associated with domain models so that updates are backward compatible. The solution presented in this article features the EMF-Syncer [2], a synchronization tool for bridging MDE-agnostic programs and MDE-aware programs, which may have some similarities in their object-oriented data models at run time. EMF-Syncer provides a generic synchronization strategy that exploits such similarities automatically and is, therefore, a suitable candidate for solving the proposed problems, since each problem relies on a small change and there is a large overlap between two versions of the same data model. In the paper, we used the case benchmark framework to justify that our solution exhibits a good balance between specification conciseness and performance.