End-User Modelling

National audienceno abstrac

Manifesto - Model Engineering for Complex Systems

Complex systems are hard to define. Nevertheless they are more and more frequently encountered. Examples include a worldwide airline traffic management system, a global telecommunication or energy infrastructure or even the whole legacy portfolio accumulated for more than thirty years in a large insurance company. There are currently few engineering methods and tools to deal with them in practice. The purpose of this Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop on Model Engineering for Complex Systems was to study the applicability of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) to the development and management of complex systems. MDE is a software engineering field based on few simple and sound principles. Its power stems from the assumption of considering everything - engineering artefacts, manipulations of artefacts, etc - as a model. Our intuition was that MDE may provide the right level of abstraction to move the study of complex systems from an informal goal to more concrete grounds. In order to provide first evidence in support of this intuition, the workshop studied different visions and different approaches to the development and management of different kinds of complex systems. This note presents the summary of the discussions

A practical approach to multi-modeling views composition

The use of several view models to specify a complex system is a common practice to provide the most appropriate abstractions to model its diverse concerns. When several view models are used to specify a system, it is necessary to compose them to generate the application. When the view models are expressed in different Domain Specific Modeling Languages a problem arises because a heterogeneous composition is required. A possible approach to avoid a heterogeneous composition is to transform the diverse models into low-level models using a common low-level modeling language as target. Therefore, when all the view models are transformed in low-level models specified with a common language, it is possible to apply a ho- mogeneous composition to obtain the final application. However, it is necessary to identify the elements to compose in the low-level. In this paper, we present an auto- matic mechanism to identify which elements will be composed. This mechanism is based on defining correspondence relationships between the high-level view mod- els and automatically deriving new correspondence between the generated low-level models

Towards the systematic construction of domain-specific transformation languages

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09195-2-13Proceedings of 10th European Conference, ECMFA 2014, Held as Part of STAF 2014, York, UK, July 21-25, 2014General-purpose transformation languages, like ATL or QVT, are the basis for model manipulation in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). However, as MDE moves to more complex scenarios, there is the need for specialized transformation languages for activities like model merging, migration or aspect weaving, or for specific domains of wide use like UML. Such domain-specific transformation languages (DSTLs) encapsulate transformation knowledge within a language, enabling the reuse of recurrent solutions to transformation problems. Nowadays, many DSTLs are built in an ad-hoc manner, which requires a high development cost to achieve a full-featured implementation. Alternatively, they are realised by an embedding into general-purpose transformation or programming languages like ATL or Java. In this paper, we propose a framework for the systematic creation of DSTLs. First, we look into the characteristics of domain-specific transformation tools, deriving a categorization which is the basis of our framework. Then, we propose a domain-specific language to describe DSTLs, from which we derive a ready-to-run workbench which includes the abstract syntax, concrete syntax and translational semantics of the DSTL.This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with project “Go Lite” (TIN2011-24139

Towards An Analysis Driven Approach for Adapting Enterprise Architecture Languages

Abstract: Enterprise Architecture (EA) modeling languages are increasingly used for various enterprise wide analyses. In most cases one needs to adapt EA languages to an appropriate level of detail. However such an adaptation is not straightforward. Language engineers currently deal with analysis driven language adaptation in an ad-hoc manner, adapting languages from scratch. This introduces various problems, such as a tendency to add uninteresting and/or unnecessary details to languages, while important enterprise details are not documented. Moreover, adding detail increases the complexity of languages, which in turn inhibits a language's communication capabilities. Yet experience from practice shows that architects often are communicators, next to analysts. As a result, one needs to find a balance between a model's communication and analysis capabilities. In this position paper we argue for an approach for assisting language engineers in adapting, in a controlled manner, EA languages for model-driven enterprise analyses. Furthermore, we present the key ingredients of such an approach, and use these as a starting point for a research outlook