In the ESL world, there seems to be many abstraction levels as the standardisation has still not strongly convince the designers working at various levels of design cycles. The SoC architect may have different views about system and would like to have detailed approximation, although a verification person may like to have something highly abstracted so that the simulation performance is high. Similarly, the firmware developer would like to have higher abstraction at many levels but may like to have some approximations in some models.
Hence there is a requirement to have adapters which converts one protocol to another protocol without missing the appropriate information (command, transactions..). I found a good article which talks about this need and possible implementations -
How to create adaptors between modeling abstraction levels EDA Edition
