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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1742/summary.pdf
Summary of the 11th International Workshop on
Models@run.time
Sebastian Götz Nelly Bencomo Kirstie Bellman Gordon Blair
Technische Universität Dresden, Germany Aston University, UK Topcy House, USA Lancaster University, UK
Email: sebastian.goetz@acm.org Email: nelly@acm.org bellmanhome@yahoo.com gordon@comp.lancs.ac.uk
Abstract—After last years anniversary, this year the 11th II. W ORKSHOP F ORMAT AND S ESSION S UMMARIES
edition of the workshop Models@run.time was held at the 19th
International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Lan-
The workshop comprised four (4) sessions, which were
guages and Systems. The workshop took place in the city of Saint structured into: a session capturing the application of runtime
Malo, France, on the 4th of October 2016. The workshop was models to cyber-physical systems and the domain of ambiant
organized by Sebastian Götz, Nelly Bencomo, Kirstie Bellman assisted living, a session on the application of runtime models
and Gordon Blair. Here, we present a summary of the discussions to self-optimizing systems and model checking, a session on
at the workshop and a synopsis of the topics discussed and
highlighted during the workshop.
infrastructures for models@run.time systems and, finally, a
session discussing how to go beyond the current state of the
art of the models@run.time community.
I. I NTRODUCTION
We aimed for lively discussions at the workshop and,
Since the first edition of the workshop, it has served as hence, decided to divide the 90min of each session into two
a podium for various topics focusing on the fundamentals 30min paper presentations and a 30min panel, where the
and applications of run-time models. The main goal of the two presenters were jointly questioned by the audience. The
workshop has been to promote cross-fertilization between re- session chairs drove the discussions to discuss the presented
searchers from different communities, including core research papers in the context of the sessions’ theme. This new format
areas such as model-driven software engineering, software turned out to be very effective. The last session captured one
architecture, computational reflection, adaptive systems, auto- paper presentation followed by a 60min open discussion on
nomic and self-healing systems, and requirements engineering, the future of models@run.time.
but also application-centric research areas such as cyber-
A. Models@run.time for Cyber-Physical Systems and AAL
physical systems, Internet of Things, and Big Data.
In consequence, this year the workshop was attended by In this session, after a short workshop opening, Erik Burger
at least thirty (30) researchers from different communities presented his paper entitled “View-based and Model-driven
throughout the day. Outage Management for the Smart Grid”. The approach
This year, seven (7) out of twelve (12) submitted papers covered in the paper, called VITRUVIUS, aimed at keeping
were accepted and presented, resulting in an acceptance rate models of different standards consistent with each other and
of 58%. They are published in this post-workshop proceedings. was exemplified by 3 standardized metamodels from the smart
As can be seen in Table I, the interest of the research grid domain being composed with each other. The approach
community in models@run.time remains high. made use of runtime models at the architectural level and
included structural as well as physical-related runtime models.
A particularly interesting observation of this year’s edition
The purpose of using runtime models was to keep multiple
of the workshop was the lack of focus on self-adaptive
models consistent with each other.
systems, which shows that the models@run.time paradigm is
The second talk was given by Luis Hernan Garcia Paucar,
being applied to a broader domain.
who presented the paper entitled “Runtime Models Based on
Dynamic Decision Networks: Enhancing the Decision-making
Year Attendees Submissions Accepted (Long+Short) in the Domain of Ambient Assisted Living Applications”. The
2008 44 20 6+6
2009 49 16 4+2
principle idea was to keep a dynamic decision network update
2010 35 15 4+6 to date with the system it captures. The approach was applied
2011 26 10 4+2 to an ambient assisted living example. In contrast to the first
2012 48 18 11
2013 25 20 7+2
paper of this session, the runtime models were used at the
2014 27 8 5 level of requirements, i.e., quality runtime models were used
2015 36 13 8 to support better-informed decision making.
2016 30 12 7
TABLE I
During the panel at the end of this session several questions
K EY N UMBERS OF THE MRT W ORKSHOP S ERIES were raised, which should be investigated in future work. The
question brought up by the audience were:
• Do we need fundamentally different runtime models for
software and the physical world?
• How do we know, when a model is to be updated and
how do we know if a decision was based on an up-2-date
model?
• How to handle the different types of uncertainty present
in runtime models?
• Can we make use of our knowledge about the real world
for the synchronization mechanism?
• Can we compose different types of uncertainty measures?
B. Models@run.time for Model Checking and Optimization
The second session started with a talk by Hiroyuki Nak-
agawa, who presented his paper entitled “Caching Strategies Fig. 1. Logo for Models@run.time
for Run-time Probabilistic Model Checking”. The goal of the
presented approach was to enable efficient runtime verifica-
be feasible by in example from the home automation domain
tion. For this, the authors extended Antonio Filieri’s runtime
(smart hotel).
verification approach to allow for structural model changes at
Subsequently, Hassan Gomaa presented his paper entitled
runtime. Interestingly, in this work, the runtime models were
“DeSARM: A Decentralized Mechanism for Discovering Soft-
used at the level of processes, i.e., runtime process models
ware Architecture Models at Runtime in Distributed Systems”.
were used for assurance by model checking. The approach
This work focused on learning the architecture of a distributed
has been applied to an example from the robotics domain.
system by observing the message flow between its individual
The subsequent talk was given by Rene Schöne, who applications. The approach was discussed using an example
presented his paper entitled “Incremental Runtime-generation from the emergency domain.
of Optimization Problems using RAG-controlled Rewriting”. The panel of this session mainly captured the question what
The goal of the presented approach was to reduce the re- infrastructures for models@run.time actually are? Several pos-
generation time of a model-to-text transformation using a sibilities have been brought up by the audience, ranging from
frequently changing runtime model as input. The approach metamodels and DSLs, over a causal connection facility to a
used structural runtime models at an architectural level and general middleware for models@run.time.
was applied to an example from the energy efficiency domain.
The discussion in panel of this session focused in three top- D. Beyond Models@run.time
ics. First, the audience debated whether applying techniques The last session was opened with a talk given by Chris
from MDSD to model checking and compiler construction Landauer and Kirstie Bellman, who presented their paper
and vice versa is beneficial. As both papers presented in this entitled “Self-modeling Systems Need Models at Run Time”.
session showed good examples of such benefits, the audience The paper points out two general problems, which are both
generally agreed. The second topic discussed with the need about the fact that reflective systems eventually get stuck.
for different layers to fix wrong or out of date runtime models Firstly, such systems will increase in size until they inevitably
depending on how wrong or out of date the model is. In this get stuck. Secondly, such systems will eventually be over-
context, the idea of applying the concept of reflexes to react constrained and, thus, get stuck as well. Four possible ap-
on small deviations came up. Third and finally, the concept proaches to address these problems were outlined:
of trust in runtime model composition was subject to the • behavior mining to introduce new “shortcuts” and by this
discussion. ease computation
• model deficiency analysis to assess how well a runtime
C. Models@run.time Infrastructures model fulfills its purpose and, by this, to take counterac-
In contrast to the first two sessions, the third session cap- tion and improve the fulfillment
tured fundamental approaches for Models@run.time. Namely, • approaches to restructure system knowledge and, by this,
the question how to realize the causal connection between the reducing the size of the system
system and it’s runtime model(s) was targeted. • constructive forgetting to reduce the size and or number
The first talk was given by Lorena Arcega, who presented of constraints of the system
here paper entitled “An Infrastructure for Generating Run-time In the following open discussion, two topics have been dis-
Model Traces for Maintenance Tasks ”. The principle idea cussed. First, the need for common use cases and benchmarks
of the approach was to observe running java code in order for the models@run.time community as already identified
to create and update a corresponding runtime model. This in previous editions of the workshop [2]. Second, whether
allows to keep a structural runtime model at the architectural the workshop series should be continued or not. All present
level of the system up-to-date. The approach was shown to participants agreed on the need to keep the workshop running.
Finally, to open the general discussion, each of the four However, this year we also ran a separate edition of mod-
organizers had to answer three questions: 1) What did you els@run.time at ICAC [1] to attract people from self-aware
like the most today? 2) What do you want to see next year? and autonomous computing. We plan to continue both editions
3) Do you like the new logo? next year, i.e., a second workshop on models@run.time for
We, as organizers, liked the fact that the workshop showed self-aware computing systems at ICAC and a 12th workshop
fundamental work on models@run.time and not just appli- on models@run.time at MODELS.
cations, the discussions on other topics than self-adaptive
systems was very welcome and the mathematical maturity of ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
the presented approaches was a key evolution of the workshop. We want to thank all participants of the workshop and, in
For next year, we wish to see more fundamental work, more particular, our program committee. The members of this years
work on requirements at runtime and more work on reflection edition are listed as follows. We reiterate our thanks to these
in particular. Finally, all organizers agreed about how well the colleagues for their effort to support the workshop:
new logo of the workshop conveys the essence and nature of Franck Chauvel, Siobhan Clarke, Fabio M. Costa, Mahdi
the models@run.time paradigm (Figure 1). Derakhshanmanesh, Antonio Filieri, Francois Fouquet, Niko-
III. C ONCLUSION laos Georgantas, Holger Giese, Ta’id Holmes, Gang Huang,
Chris Landauer, Lionel Seinturier, Arnor Solberg, Hui Song
The eleventh edition of the international workshop on mod- and Thomas Vogel.
els@run.time was again very well visited (30+ participants).
The trend of submissions remained the same as in compari- R EFERENCES
son to the last 2 years. Notably, although only few papers were
[1] Sebastian Götz, Nelly Bencomo, Kirstie Bellman, and Gordon Blair. 1st
submitted (12), as a set they presented high quality, which international workshop on models@run.time for self-aware computing
allowed us to accept seven (7) papers. systems. In IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing
Since the first edition of the workshop, it was constantly (ICAC), pages 363–363, July 2016.
[2] Sebastian Götz, Nelly Bencomo, and Robert France. Devising the
co-located to the MODELS conference and, consequently, future of the models@run.time workshop. SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes,
mainly attracted participants from the modeling community. 40(1):26–29, February 2015.