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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2019/mdetools_intro.pdf
Summary of Workshop on Model-Driven
Engineering Tools (MDETools’17)
Mojtaba Bagherzadeh Francis Bordeleau Jean-Michel Bruel Juergen Dingel
School of Computing Cmind Inc. IRIT School of Computing
Queen’s University Ottawa, Canada University of Toulouse Queen’s University
Kingston, Canada francis.bordeleau@cmind.io Toulouse, France Kingston, Canada
mojtaba@cs.queensu.ca bruel@irit.fr dingel@cs.queensu.ca
Sébastien Gérard Nicolas Hili Sebastian Voss
CEA list School of Computing fortiss GmbH
Saclay, France Queen’s University Munich, Germany
sebastien.gerard@cea.fr Kingston, Canada voss@fortiss.org
hili@cs.queensu.ca
Abstract—The first workshop specifically devoted to tools III. P ROGRAM
supporting Model Driven Engineering was held September 19,
2017 in Austin, Texas, USA. The motivation, scope, objectives, A total of eight submissions were received. Five of these
and results of the workshop are summarized. were accepted. The program consisted of a keynote, paper
Index Terms—Model-driven Engineering, tools, software and
systems modeling
presentations, a demo session, and a discussion session.
The keynote ‘MDE Tools in Industry and Education: Under-
I. M OTIVATION standing, Comparing and Improving the Tools’ was given by
The easy availability of high-quality tools with effective Cortland Starrett, currently president of One Fact Inc, a com-
supporting materials and documentation significantly increases pany developing open source modeling tools (BridgePoint)
the chances of adoption for any new software development as well as modeling client applications. In his presentation,
approach. Several research communities have recognized the Cortland drew on his experience in both industry and education
importance of tools and, e.g., created workshops specifically and discussed some of the challenges of comparing tools, but
designed to facilitate the evaluation and comparison of tools also showed several inspiring examples involving modeling
(for, e.g., language workbenches [1], transformations [2], and design challenges such as ET-Robocon, a UML robot
satisfiability solving [3], and verification [4]). contest that has been held annually since 2002 and whose
In contrast, the modeling research community does not attendance has grown from 20 (2002) to 1800 (2013) with
appear to be paying as much attention to effectively leveraging over 360 teams from industry, academia, and education [7].
tools for illustrating, evaluating, and disseminating research Two of the accepted papers used the ‘Rover’ challenge
results, and for making a convincing case for more wide- problem as example: the paper “Engineering a Rover Lan-
spread adoption of modeling and MDE. More specifically, guage in GEMOC Studio & MontiCore” by Thomas Degueule,
1) there is evidence suggesting that the quality of documenta- Tanja Mayerhofer and Andreas Wortmann compared language
tion of many MDE tools is too low [5], design using a ‘modelware’ tool (GEMOC) and a ‘grammar-
2) while efforts have been made to compare modeling ap- ware’ tool (MontiCore). The paper “A Scenario-based MDE
proaches (in, e.g., the Comparing Modeling Approaches Work- process for Developing Reactive Systems: A Cleaning Robot
shop [6]), there is insufficient support for evaluating and Example” by Joel Greenyer, Daniel Gritzner, Jianwei Shi and
comparing MDE tools, their suitability for specific tasks, and Eric Wete illustrated the use and utility of scenario-based
opportunities for interoperation and reuse, and modeling.
3) few repeatable tool evaluations and comparisons exist that Another pair of papers was devoted to identifying promising
use appropriate, publicly accessible use cases and that have new research problems. The paper “Modelling as a Service:
been carried out by independent third parties. A Survey of Existing Tools” by Saheed Popoola, Jeffrey
II. C HALLENGE PROBLEMS AND VIDEO TUTORIALS Carver and Jeff Gray presented a first classification of web-
based modeling tools and the paper “Challenges and Research
To facilitate the comparison of tools, two challenge prob-
Directions for Successfully Applying MDE Tools in Practice”
lems were defined by the organizers, called ‘Rover’ and ‘The
by Francis Bordeleau, Grischa Liebel, Alexander Raschke,
Intelligent House’. Descriptions were made available online1 .
Gerald Stieglbauer and Matthias Tichy focussed on how best
1 http://mase.cs.queensu.ca/mdetools to integrate MDE tools into industrial practice.
Also, two papers from the Workshop on Human Factors allows, e.g., effective assessment of the product’s current and
in Modeling were presented: “Investigating the Effects of future performance and expected lifetime (e.g., preventative
Integrating Handcrafted Code in Model-Driven Engineering” maintenance) as well as optimization and improvements in
by Tim Bolender, Bernhard Rumpe and Andreas Wortmann, product design and operating conditions. The digital twin is
and “Visual Variables in UML: a First Empirical Assessment” thus relevant not only for defect prediction and avoidance, but
by Yosser El Ahmar, Xavier Le Pallec and Sébastien Gérard. also to systems engineering and lifecycle management. The
Both of these papers emphasized the need for more empirical digital thread, however, refers to the ability to integrate rele-
studies, albeit on different topics. vant information from different, traditionally disjoint sources
Finally, demos of a tool for scenario modeling (Scenari- to allow for the “right information to be available in the right
oTools) and an Eclipse plugin for collaborative modeling using place at the right time” [12]. Realization and use of both
the ReMoDD model repository were given. concepts could benefit from the expertise in the modeling
community on, e.g., domain-specific modeling; monitoring,
IV. D ISCUSSION AND RESULTS animation, simulation; ‘models at runtime’; and support for
Overall, the different parts of the workshop were attended different views. However, they also require solutions to the
by about 30 people, Most had academic affiliations, but some model integration problem already mentioned above.
representatives from industry were present as well. Discussion 4) Human factors: The presentations on human factors
was lively, continued past the scheduled end of the workshop, were very well received and triggered comments about the
and focussed mostly on the following topics: need to improve the usability of MDE tools and the current
1) Challenge problems: Two challenge problems had been scarcity of empirical studies investigating usability or the
defined by the workshop organizers to facilitate comparison impact of modeling.
of tools. The problems were phrased in very general terms
to allow for the participation of a broad set of MDE tools V. C ONCLUSION
that leverage models for different purposes. The keynote had The workshop provided a forum for the exchange of ideas
encouraged the use of challenges and contests and shown and identification of challenges and opportunities related to
several successful examples. In the 1995, the ‘Production Cell’ the development and use of MDE tools. The use of challenge
problem had allowed the comparison of different formal meth- problems was recommended, together with an increased focus
ods [8]. On the other hand, the effort required to define suitable on systems engineering, interoperability and integration (e.g.,
problems was acknowledged. Overall, the use of challenge in the context of OSLC and the digital twin and digital thread
problems was considered worthwhile and the formulation of, concepts), usability and empirical studies.
e.g., a ‘rover contest’, in which MDE tools are to be used to R EFERENCES
develop software for a rover to accomplish some task, was
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[3] SAT Competition. 19th International Conference on Theory and Applica-
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[5] N. Kahani, M. Bagherzadeh, J. Dingel, J.R. Cordy. The problems
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