A phasing mechanism for model transformation languages

In recent years a great effort has been devoted to understanding the nature of model transformations. As a result, several mechanisms to improve model transformation languages have been proposed. Phasing has been proposed in some works as a rule scheduling or organization mechanism, but without any detail. In this paper, we present a phasing mechanism a we explain in detail how it can be integrated in a transformation language and when its usage is appropriate. The mechanism we propose can be seen as an internal transformation composition mechanism. First, we motivate the work, and then we describe in depth the mechanism. Finally, we show four examples of application and give some conclusions.