- Email: [email protected]
Special issue on Flexible Model Driven Engineering
Author’s Accepted Manuscript Special Issue Engineering
on
Flexible
Model
Driven
Davide Di Ruscio, Juan de Lara, Alfonso Pierantonio www.elsevier.com/locate/cl
PII: DOI: Reference:
S1477-8424(16)30206-8 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cl.2016.12.003 COMLAN244
To appear in: Computer Language Cite this article as: Davide Di Ruscio, Juan de Lara and Alfonso Pierantonio, Special Issue on Flexible Model Driven Engineering, Computer Language, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cl.2016.12.003 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting galley proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
Special Issue on Flexible Model Driven Engineering Davide Di Ruscioa , Juan de Larab , Alfonso Pierantonioa a University b Universidad
of L’Aquila (Italy) Autonoma de Madrid (Spain)
Increasingly, models are starting to become commonplace and Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is gaining acceptance in many domains including the automotive, aerospace, railway, telecommunications, business, mobile development, and finance domains. Over the last years, several approaches and modeling platforms have been developed to simplify and automate many steps of MDE processes. However, still several challenges have to be solved in order to enable a wider adoption of MDE technologies. One of the most important impediments in adopting MDE tools is related to the reduced flexibility of existing approaches. For example, regarding modelling, there is a need to promote flexibility and tolerate inconsistencies at the early stages of the development (to promote creativity and facility discussion between the stakeholders); while in the final phases, precise models and conformance to their meta-model are needed to enable verification, simulation or code generation. However, current MDE tools tend to focus on precision, with little tolerance for inconsistencies. Regarding model management operations, these are defined over the types of specific meta-models, and hence are difficult to reuse for meta-models other than the ones they were designed for. This can be seen as a rigidity of the standard conformance relation in MDE. The Flexible Model Driven Engineering (FlexMDE) Workshop series [1, 2], co-located with the MoDELS conference was initiated as a forum to propose and discuss techniques attacking the lack of flexibility of MDE frameworks and
Email addresses: [email protected] (Davide Di Ruscio), [email protected] (Juan de Lara), [email protected] (Alfonso Pierantonio)
Preprint submitted to Journal of LATEX Templates
December 28, 2016
solutions nowadays. This special issue of the Computer Languages, Systems & Structures journal (COMLAN) is devoted to the topic of flexibility in MDE, and was open to both papers presented at the FlexMDE 2015 workshop [1] (held in Ottawa on September 29, 2015), as well as further works targeting topic in this area. Each submitted paper was reviewed by three reviewers, and was discussed in detail. Three papers were eventually accepted for inclusion in the special issue out of 7 initial submissions (3 of them were extensions of the FlexMDE workshop papers). The papers included in this special issue are the following: • Safe Model Polymorphism for Flexible Modeling by Thomas Degueule, Benoit Combemale, Arnaud Blouin, Olivier Barais and Jean-Marc J´ez´equel. This paper aims at making more flexible the typing relation in MDE. For this purpose, the authors propose a disciplined approach that leverages type group polymorphism to provide an advanced type system for manipulating models in a polymorphic way, through different DSL interfaces. • A Text-Based Visual Notation for the Unit Testing of Model-Driven Tools by Daniel Strueber, Felix Rieger and Gabriele Taentzer. In this paper, the authors propose a notation directed to combine the benefits of visual and text-based approaches for specifying unit tests in MDE. The notation is at the same time visual and text-based, as it uses ASCII characters to emulate the familiar graphical notations, and hence improves the readability and understandability of the test cases. • Constraint Programming for Type Inference in Flexible Model-Driven Engineering by Athanasios Zolotas, Robert Claris´o, Nicholas Matragkas, Dimitris Kolovos and Richard Paige. The authors present their approach based on so called Muddles for flexible modelling, which combines the possibility of creating models in informal diagramming tools, with the ability to process such models using model management languages and MDE techniques. In particular, this paper proposes a novel approach
2
that assists in the inference of the types of untyped model elements using Constraint Programming. As editors of this special issue, we hope you will enjoy this selection of insightful papers and will appreciate the diversity of topics currently investigated in the field of Flexible MDE. We would like to thank the many people who have contributed to the success of the FlexMDE workshops and subsequently to this special issue. In particular, to the workshops Programme Committee, the authors and participants, and the numerous external reviewers who contributed to the important task of reviewing papers for both workshop and/or this special issue. We would also particularly like to thank COMLAN’s Editor-in-Chief, Marjan Mernik, for all the help he provided along the way.
References [1] D. D. Ruscio, J. de Lara, A. Pierantonio (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Flexible Model Driven Engineering co-located with ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages & Systems (MoDELS 2015), Ottawa, Canada, September 29, 2015, Vol. 1470 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2015. URL http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1470 [2] D. D. Ruscio, J. de Lara, A. Pierantonio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Flexible Model Driven Engineering co-located with ACM/IEEE 19th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages & Systems (MoDELS 2016), Saint-Malo, France, October 2, 2016, Vol. 1694 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2016. URL http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1694
3
on
Flexible
Model
Driven
Davide Di Ruscio, Juan de Lara, Alfonso Pierantonio www.elsevier.com/locate/cl
PII: DOI: Reference:
S1477-8424(16)30206-8 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cl.2016.12.003 COMLAN244
To appear in: Computer Language Cite this article as: Davide Di Ruscio, Juan de Lara and Alfonso Pierantonio, Special Issue on Flexible Model Driven Engineering, Computer Language, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cl.2016.12.003 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting galley proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
Special Issue on Flexible Model Driven Engineering Davide Di Ruscioa , Juan de Larab , Alfonso Pierantonioa a University b Universidad
of L’Aquila (Italy) Autonoma de Madrid (Spain)
Increasingly, models are starting to become commonplace and Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is gaining acceptance in many domains including the automotive, aerospace, railway, telecommunications, business, mobile development, and finance domains. Over the last years, several approaches and modeling platforms have been developed to simplify and automate many steps of MDE processes. However, still several challenges have to be solved in order to enable a wider adoption of MDE technologies. One of the most important impediments in adopting MDE tools is related to the reduced flexibility of existing approaches. For example, regarding modelling, there is a need to promote flexibility and tolerate inconsistencies at the early stages of the development (to promote creativity and facility discussion between the stakeholders); while in the final phases, precise models and conformance to their meta-model are needed to enable verification, simulation or code generation. However, current MDE tools tend to focus on precision, with little tolerance for inconsistencies. Regarding model management operations, these are defined over the types of specific meta-models, and hence are difficult to reuse for meta-models other than the ones they were designed for. This can be seen as a rigidity of the standard conformance relation in MDE. The Flexible Model Driven Engineering (FlexMDE) Workshop series [1, 2], co-located with the MoDELS conference was initiated as a forum to propose and discuss techniques attacking the lack of flexibility of MDE frameworks and
Email addresses: [email protected] (Davide Di Ruscio), [email protected] (Juan de Lara), [email protected] (Alfonso Pierantonio)
Preprint submitted to Journal of LATEX Templates
December 28, 2016
solutions nowadays. This special issue of the Computer Languages, Systems & Structures journal (COMLAN) is devoted to the topic of flexibility in MDE, and was open to both papers presented at the FlexMDE 2015 workshop [1] (held in Ottawa on September 29, 2015), as well as further works targeting topic in this area. Each submitted paper was reviewed by three reviewers, and was discussed in detail. Three papers were eventually accepted for inclusion in the special issue out of 7 initial submissions (3 of them were extensions of the FlexMDE workshop papers). The papers included in this special issue are the following: • Safe Model Polymorphism for Flexible Modeling by Thomas Degueule, Benoit Combemale, Arnaud Blouin, Olivier Barais and Jean-Marc J´ez´equel. This paper aims at making more flexible the typing relation in MDE. For this purpose, the authors propose a disciplined approach that leverages type group polymorphism to provide an advanced type system for manipulating models in a polymorphic way, through different DSL interfaces. • A Text-Based Visual Notation for the Unit Testing of Model-Driven Tools by Daniel Strueber, Felix Rieger and Gabriele Taentzer. In this paper, the authors propose a notation directed to combine the benefits of visual and text-based approaches for specifying unit tests in MDE. The notation is at the same time visual and text-based, as it uses ASCII characters to emulate the familiar graphical notations, and hence improves the readability and understandability of the test cases. • Constraint Programming for Type Inference in Flexible Model-Driven Engineering by Athanasios Zolotas, Robert Claris´o, Nicholas Matragkas, Dimitris Kolovos and Richard Paige. The authors present their approach based on so called Muddles for flexible modelling, which combines the possibility of creating models in informal diagramming tools, with the ability to process such models using model management languages and MDE techniques. In particular, this paper proposes a novel approach
2
that assists in the inference of the types of untyped model elements using Constraint Programming. As editors of this special issue, we hope you will enjoy this selection of insightful papers and will appreciate the diversity of topics currently investigated in the field of Flexible MDE. We would like to thank the many people who have contributed to the success of the FlexMDE workshops and subsequently to this special issue. In particular, to the workshops Programme Committee, the authors and participants, and the numerous external reviewers who contributed to the important task of reviewing papers for both workshop and/or this special issue. We would also particularly like to thank COMLAN’s Editor-in-Chief, Marjan Mernik, for all the help he provided along the way.
References [1] D. D. Ruscio, J. de Lara, A. Pierantonio (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Flexible Model Driven Engineering co-located with ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages & Systems (MoDELS 2015), Ottawa, Canada, September 29, 2015, Vol. 1470 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2015. URL http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1470 [2] D. D. Ruscio, J. de Lara, A. Pierantonio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Flexible Model Driven Engineering co-located with ACM/IEEE 19th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages & Systems (MoDELS 2016), Saint-Malo, France, October 2, 2016, Vol. 1694 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2016. URL http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1694
3