-The first workshop specifically devoted to tools supporting Model Driven Engineering was held September 19, 2017 in Austin, Texas, USA. The motivation, scope, objectives, and results of the workshop are summarized. Index Terms-Model-driven Engineering, tools, software and systems modeling III. PROGRAM
The easy availability of high-quality tools with effective
supporting materials and documentation significantly increases
the chances of adoption for any new software development
approach. Several research communities have recognized the
importance of tools and, e.g., created workshops specifically
designed to facilitate the evaluation and comparison of tools
(for, e.g., language workbenches [
In contrast, the modeling research community does not
appear to be paying as much attention to effectively leveraging
tools for illustrating, evaluating, and disseminating research
results, and for making a convincing case for more
widespread adoption of modeling and MDE. More specifically,
1) there is evidence suggesting that the quality of
documentation of many MDE tools is too low [
To facilitate the comparison of tools, two challenge problems were defined by the organizers, called ‘Rover’ and ‘The Intelligent House’. Descriptions were made available online1. 1http://mase.cs.queensu.ca/mdetools
A total of eight submissions were received. Five of these were accepted. The program consisted of a keynote, paper presentations, a demo session, and a discussion session.
The keynote ‘MDE Tools in Industry and Education:
Understanding, Comparing and Improving the Tools’ was given by
Cortland Starrett, currently president of One Fact Inc, a
company developing open source modeling tools (BridgePoint)
as well as modeling client applications. In his presentation,
Cortland drew on his experience in both industry and education
and discussed some of the challenges of comparing tools, but
also showed several inspiring examples involving modeling
and design challenges such as ET-Robocon, a UML robot
contest that has been held annually since 2002 and whose
attendance has grown from 20 (2002) to 1800 (2013) with
over 360 teams from industry, academia, and education [
Two of the accepted papers used the ‘Rover’ challenge problem as example: the paper “Engineering a Rover Language in GEMOC Studio & MontiCore” by Thomas Degueule, Tanja Mayerhofer and Andreas Wortmann compared language design using a ‘modelware’ tool (GEMOC) and a ‘grammarware’ tool (MontiCore). The paper “A Scenario-based MDE process for Developing Reactive Systems: A Cleaning Robot Example” by Joel Greenyer, Daniel Gritzner, Jianwei Shi and Eric Wete illustrated the use and utility of scenario-based modeling.
Another pair of papers was devoted to identifying promising new research problems. The paper “Modelling as a Service: A Survey of Existing Tools” by Saheed Popoola, Jeffrey Carver and Jeff Gray presented a first classification of webbased modeling tools and the paper “Challenges and Research Directions for Successfully Applying MDE Tools in Practice” by Francis Bordeleau, Grischa Liebel, Alexander Raschke, Gerald Stieglbauer and Matthias Tichy focussed on how best to integrate MDE tools into industrial practice.
Also, two papers from the Workshop on Human Factors in Modeling were presented: “Investigating the Effects of Integrating Handcrafted Code in Model-Driven Engineering” by Tim Bolender, Bernhard Rumpe and Andreas Wortmann, and “Visual Variables in UML: a First Empirical Assessment” by Yosser El Ahmar, Xavier Le Pallec and Se´bastien Ge´rard. Both of these papers emphasized the need for more empirical studies, albeit on different topics.
Finally, demos of a tool for scenario modeling (ScenarioTools) and an Eclipse plugin for collaborative modeling using the ReMoDD model repository were given.
Overall, the different parts of the workshop were attended by about 30 people, Most had academic affiliations, but some representatives from industry were present as well. Discussion was lively, continued past the scheduled end of the workshop, and focussed mostly on the following topics:
1) Challenge problems: Two challenge problems had been
defined by the workshop organizers to facilitate comparison
of tools. The problems were phrased in very general terms
to allow for the participation of a broad set of MDE tools
that leverage models for different purposes. The keynote had
encouraged the use of challenges and contests and shown
several successful examples. In the 1995, the ‘Production Cell’
problem had allowed the comparison of different formal
methods [
2) Systems engineering and integration: The industry
participants noted that modeling is extensively used in systems
engineering, where it supports the development of the entire
product and not just its software. Due to the many different
kinds of models and tools used, integration of the relevant
information contained in different models constitutes a major
challenge. It was noted that the ‘Open Services for Lifecycle
Collaboration (OSLC)’ effort aims at facilitating this kind
of large-scale, product-wide integration and helping
organizations transition from ‘document-centric’ to ‘model-centric’
production processes that are organized around linked data
and model repositories [
3) Digital twin and digital thread: The concepts of ‘Digital
Twin’ and ‘Digital Thread’ were first introduced by the
military aircraft industry, but are gaining interest in other domains
such as digital and smart manufacturing and ‘Industrie 4.0’. In
short, the digital twin refers to a digital model of a product that
allows, e.g., effective assessment of the product’s current and
future performance and expected lifetime (e.g., preventative
maintenance) as well as optimization and improvements in
product design and operating conditions. The digital twin is
thus relevant not only for defect prediction and avoidance, but
also to systems engineering and lifecycle management. The
digital thread, however, refers to the ability to integrate
relevant information from different, traditionally disjoint sources
to allow for the “right information to be available in the right
place at the right time” [
4) Human factors: The presentations on human factors were very well received and triggered comments about the need to improve the usability of MDE tools and the current scarcity of empirical studies investigating usability or the impact of modeling.
The workshop provided a forum for the exchange of ideas and identification of challenges and opportunities related to the development and use of MDE tools. The use of challenge problems was recommended, together with an increased focus on systems engineering, interoperability and integration (e.g., in the context of OSLC and the digital twin and digital thread concepts), usability and empirical studies.