Registered user since Thu 25 Jul 2024
Sylvain Guérin is a lecturer (associate professor) in software engineering in the IT department at IMT Atlantique, Brest. He is a member of the P4S (Processes for Safe and Secure Software and Systems) team at the Lab-STICC (UMR 6285). After a career in industry, he defended in 2023 a Ph. D. thesis entitled “FML: A Model Federation Language For Semantic Interoperability of Heterogeneous Information Sources”. His area of research and teaching is software engineering, with a particular focus on modeling and model-driven engineering (MDE).
He is particularly interested in the problem of managing the coherence of multiple concerns at business level, each of which has its own autonomy and life cycle, with its own tools and artifacts. This raises the problem of heterogeneous information sources, their (re-)interpretation and consistency management according to their evolution. In this context, the “model federation” approach proposes to explicitly reify the links between federated models, and to associate behavior with them. This approach is based on a modeling language called FML, which is both a language for conceptualization and reification of interpretation, but also has a references mechanism that enables federation connects to heterogeneous data sources. He is the main contributor to the Openflexo software infrastructure, which is an implementation of this solution.
His work has led him to promote modeling in various contexts:
- “Model-Oriented Programming“ (MOP) is the proposal of a programming paradigm that allows strong coupling between code and model, without code transformation and/or generation, avoiding round-trip-related issues. PAMELA is a modeling framework written in Java that follows this paradigm. PAMELA provides a smooth integration between model and code and enables Java developers to handle software development both at conceptual level and at source-code level. Execution results from a composition of model interpretation and specific code execution.
- The “cybercontracts“ approach is a generalization of work on “Model-Oriented Programming” (MOP) and “Aspect-Oriented Programming” (AOP), applied to the domain of cybersecurity
- He promotes the use of models by non-expert users of modeling techniques. In this context, “Free Modelling” aims to provide tools for capturing business expertise in the form of models, based on the artifacts manipulated by different domain experts. The aim is to co-construct a model and its metamodel from examples that are explicit for the domain experts, using the representation they are familiar with. A prototype (FreeModellingEditor) has been developed on the Openflexo infrastructure.
- Finally, he is interested in Industry 4.0, and more specifically in the Digital Twin. He defends the idea of the Digital Twin, linked to its reference system, as a place for aggregating and integrating data sources and models, to address diverse concerns.
Contributions