The MODELS series of conferences is the premier venue for the exchange of innovative technical ideas and experiences relating to model-driven approaches in the development of software-based systems. Topics covered by the conference include domain-specific modeling languages, model-driven engineering, model transformations, aspect-oriented modeling, verification and validation and real-time.

Following the tradition of previous conferences, MODELS 2020 will host a number of workshops, during the three days before the main conference. The workshops will provide a collaborative forum for a group of typically 15 to 30 participants to exchange recent and/or preliminary results, to conduct intensive discussions on a particular topic, or to coordinate efforts between representatives of a technical community. They are intended as a forum for lively discussion of innovative ideas, recent progress, or practical experience on model-driven engineering for specific aspects, specific problems, or domain-specific needs. Each workshop should provide a balanced distribution of its time for both presentation of papers (favoring the attendance of young researchers) and discussions. We encourage prospective workshop organizers to submit proposals for highly-interactive workshops focusing on areas related to modeling in general. Both research-oriented and applied topics are welcome. The duration of these workshops is in general one day, but we encourage the submission of half-day workshop proposals on focused topics as well.

Submission Process

Submit your workshop proposal electronically in PDF using the Springer LNCS style through the MODELS EasyChair submission site. Please ensure that you adhere to the workshop proposal guidelines (given below) providing all requested information about the proposed workshop using at most five pages. Please add in addition a one page draft of your planned Call for Papersto the proposal (not included in the five pages). In order to ensure a proper coordination with the deadlines of the main conference, the following constraints have to be respected by the deadlines you plan for your workshop.

Furthermore, we also welcome submissions related to this year’s theme: modeling in the era of data. This year, MODELS has a special theme on “Modeling in the era of data”. We especially encourage contributions where model-driven engineering intersects with research and applications on, not exclusively, data curation, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, Internet of Things, and smart cities.

Proceedings

As in previous years, there will be joint workshop proceedings in the ACM Digital Library that include papers from all workshops. For each workshop, the joint proceedings will include: an opening message from the organizers, including, if applicable, the workshop program committee, and all peer-reviewed papers presented in the workshop.

Formatting instructions are available here for both LaTeX and Word users. LaTeX users must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble of the document (i.e., \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}). The review option adds line numbers, thereby allowing referees to refer to specific lines in their comments. Papers should have at least 5 pages. We propose page limits of 5 pages for short papers and 10 pages for full papers following the same style and format of the main tracks of the Conference.

Proposal guidelines

Here are the guidelines regarding the information you must include in your proposal and how the proposal document needs to be structured.

1. Workshop title
   • Organizers and primary contact (name / affiliation / email)
   • Abstract
2. Motivation
   • Objectives
   • Intended audience
   • Relevance (in particular to the MODELS community)
   • Context (any past events related to your workshop including related conferences, previous workshops, previous sessions, and previous experience of the current organizers)
   • Need (comments in favor of your application; if your workshop was at MODELS’19 or any of the former conferences, why is it useful to run it again?)
3. Organization
   • Details on the organizers
   • Workshop program committee (indicated as finalized or expected)
   • Would you be willing to merge your workshop with other workshops on a similar topic if this were a condition for hosting your workshop at MODELS?
4. Workshop format
   • Planned deadlines
   • Intended paper format
   • For short papers, the limit is five (5) pages, without counting the CfP proposed (in case you submit the CfP)
   • For full papers, the limit is ten (10) pages
   • Evaluation process
   • Intended publication of accepted papers (printed proceedings or website)
   • Intended workshop format (including duration, number of presentations, and planned keynotes)
   • How many participants do you expect (please make at least an educated guess)?
   • What kind of equipment do you need (e.g., data projector, computer, whiteboard)?
5. Additional material
   • Workshop web page (URL of the draft web page, if one exists)
   • Draft Call for papersfor the Workshop (a one page Call for papersthat you intend to send out if your workshop is accepted)

[W1] MASE: Modeling in Automotive System and Software Engineering

Organizers: Alessio Bucaioni, Jo Atlee, Juergen Dingel, and Sahar Kokaly

The development of modern automotive systems is a formidable challenge. As a consequence, the automotive industry has been on the forefront of many engineering advances including, for instance, leveraging and managing complexity through modelling and model-driven engineering. Modelling has been playing a key role in the automotive industry for a long time, has enabled many advances, and is likely to hold the key to addressing many current and future challenges. The main goal of the workshop is to bring together practitioners and researchers from industry and academia interested in automotive system and software and modelling to present and discuss advances to the state-of-the-art and open problems.

[W2] OpenMBEE: Open Model Based Engineering Environment

Organizers: Robert Karban, Ahsan Quamar, Juergen Dingel, Sebastian Herzig, Ed Seidewitz, Markus Voelter, Brittany Friedland, Bjorn Cole, and Ivan Gomes

The Open Model Based Engineering Environment (OpenMBEE) group is a community of engineering practitioners, software developers, and researchers that share a common vision for a world in which engineering modeling relies on a rich open source set of models and software that support engineering modeling and analysis in the form of an integrated environment. This environment shall enable collaborative modeling at scale and be an open platform for (system) engineering tools. It is also expected to support conventions and practices that will support cultivating a culture of collaborative engineering model development to transform the currently often siloed engineering practice. Using software development as a guide, we expect engineering modeling will leverage many of those capabilities and practices with additional novelty germane to the world of engineering modeling and analysis. As in most organizations documents are still the primary publishing mechanism for engineering work based on models, the environment is expected to enable mutually consistent and corresponding engineering models and documents achieving the single source of authority. The OpenMBEE community strives to develop capabilities that help organizations better define and manage their MBX (Model Based X) ecosystems. MBX ecosystems consist of the models, tools, processes, and people/roles that come together to develop the systems and products that an organization cares about. The MBEE capabilities and tooling scope for this workshop is not restricted to the currently available items, although it is encouraged to leverage them. The goal is to contribute processes, code, apps, services and artifacts that are accessible by OpenMBEE users as well as vendors and partners, and allow them to collaboratively construct and analyze the precision products needed to develop missions and systems. In the OpenMBEE context, SysMLv2 is emerging into the multi-language paradigm together with Project Jupyter as a popular polyglot engineering platform for analytical and computational models. Similarly, in the Jupyter and Python space there is a desire to see broader modeling capabilities in these general purpose languages. They are envisaged to play a major role in the near future as key enabling technologies for MBx ecosystems.

[W3] UM: Uncertainty @ MODELS 2020

Organizers: Richard Paige, Fiona Polack, and Michalis Famelis

Uncertainty is becoming a focus of interest in software and systems engineering. Within the Models community, the OMG Working Group on Uncertainty has been a focus for the semantics of uncertainty and modelling activities for several years. Interest in uncertainty arises in complex areas such as assurance, and large-scale simulation. For example, in agent simulation engineering there is a need to be able to track uncertainties in developing, and interpreting the results of, research simulations. Moving beyond control of uncertainty, researchers in “systems of systems”, or engineered complex systems, are increasingly aware that the presence of unrecognised uncertainties can destroy assurance which carefully argues for the mitigation of all identified hazards or risks.

This workshop seeks participation from anyone, whether from academia or industry, who seeks to understand how uncertainty interferes with our engineering certainties and assumptions, whether to control it, to recognise and work with it, or to measure it and its effects.

The objective of the workshop is to expose, compare and synthesise approaches to and challenges of uncertainty in software and systems engineering. To achieve this, we propose a workshop format of short presentations on any aspect or form of uncertainty, followed by problem-specific or domain-specific discussion sessions accessible to academic and industrial practitioners.

[W4] MLE: Modelling Language Engineering and Execution

Organizers: Taylor Riche, Andreas Wortmann, and Steffen Zschaler

Modelling is a key paradigm to successfully engineering current and future software-intensive systems in collaboration with experts from multiple domains. These experts use domain-specific concepts, notations, and paradigms that need to be expressed in suitable, domain-specific modelling languages. Conceiving, engineering, evolving, and maintaining suitable, domain-specific modelling languages, hence, is crucial to our capability to handle increasing software complexity. Consequently, modelling-language engineering is vital to the success of modelling in particular and the engineering of software-intensive systems in general. The proposed MLE workshop will be a full-day workshop bringing together researchers and practitioners in the modelling-language and language-engineering communities to discuss the challenges associated with integrating multiple, heterogeneous, executable modelling languages. Following five previous editions of the GEMOC workshop, four previous editions of the EXE workshop, and the first edition of their integration into the MLE’19 workshop, this edition will continue the success of both workshops and, again, attract a large number of interested participants from the MODELS community.

[W5] MDE Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence and Model-driven Engineering

Organizers: Loli Burgueño, Manuel Wimmer, and Steffen Zschaler

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become part of everyone’s life. More recently, AI has started to impact all aspects of the system and software engineering lifecycle, from specification to design, testing, deployment and maintenance, with the main goal of helping engineers produce systems and software faster and with better quality while being able to handle ever more complex systems. We believe there is a clear need for AI-empowered MDE, which will push the limits of ““classic”” MDE and provide the right techniques to develop the next generation of software systems. At the same time, AI is complex software itself, and can benefit from MDE in its engineering process and specially w.r.t. the challenge of designing trustable AI software.

This workshop provides a forum to discuss, study, and explore the opportunities and challenges raised by the integration of AI and MDE and how both fields can benefit from cross-fertilization and collaboration. It provides the opportunity to discuss: (i) how to choose, evaluate, and adapt AI techniques for MDE (AI4MDE) as a way to improve current system and software modeling and generation processes, increasing the benefits and reducing the costs of adopting MDE; and (ii) what are the benefits that MDE can bring to the development of AI-based systems (MDE4AI).

[W6] ME+AMMoRe

ME: Models and Evolution

Organizers: Ludovico Iovino, Dalila Tamzalit, and Alfonso Pierantonio

Software artefacts constantly increase in complexity, variety and novelty. Environment and business constraints, user requirements and new insights put additional pressure on their adaptability, availability, reliability and quality: they continuously need to be up to date. But evolution issues are critical, complex and costly to manage. They concern requirements, architecture, design, source code, documentation, integration or deployment. They also typically affect various kinds of models (data, behavioural, domain, source code or goal models). Addressing and managing these varieties of changes is essential. Models and meta-models, the cornerstone of complex software systems’ abstractions, represent a powerful mean for facing software evolution challenges by ensuring a more abstract and expressive modeling of software evolution. They can help and guide software evolution and can enforce and reduce critical risks and important involved resources. The workshop puts the focus on Models and Evolution by considering two main sides: (1) Managing software evolution needs by relying on the high-level abstraction power of models and meta-models. (2) Managing model and metamodel evolution needs and the co-evolution of all related software artefacts by putting attention to their increasing evolution issues as they become primary artefacts.

AMMoRe: Analytics and Mining of Model Repositories

Organizers: Önder Babur, Michel Chaudron, Loek Cleophas, Ludovico Iovino, and Dimitris Kolovos

Model-based approaches promote the use of models and related artefacts (such as metamodels and model transformations) as central elements to tackle the complexity of building systems. Both in academia and in industry there is a growing need to efficiently i) store; ii) analyse; and ii) search & navigate, and iii) curate large collections of models. Such collections include for example large sets of software models such as the Lindholmen UML dataset, or of heterogeneous models in large MDE ecosystems and systems-of-systems, including e.g. software, hardware, and business models. The workshop Analytics and Mining of Model Repositories (AMMoRe) aims to gather modelling researchers and practitioners to discuss the emerging problems and propose solutions. The scope ranges from industrial reports and empirical analyses in the problem domain to novel cross-disciplinary approaches for large-scale analytics and management, e.g. exploiting techniques from data analytics, repository mining and machine learning.

[W7] SecureMDE: Security for and by Model-Driven Engineering

Organizers: Salvador Martinez, Nicolas Belloir, Jordi Cabot, and Domenico Bianculli

There are at least two ways in which MDE and Security might be beneficially combined: using MDE to support the development of secure systems and, integrating security techniques in MDE to give support to new development scenarios such as collaborative and distributed modeling. In this sense, SecureMDE 2020 will provide a forum for presenting and discussing a wide range of topics related to the interplay between MDE and Security. Indeed, even MDE has succeeded to play a key role in many critical tasks related to ICT security, new domains such as Internet of Things, Cyber-physical systems and Blockchain-based technologies stress the limitations of previous work and pose new challenges to current model-driven security techniques.

The workshop seeks contributions that provide novel results, work-in-progress or experience results on the integration of security tools and techniques in MDE development. SecureMDE 2020 also looks forward to receiving papers summarizing the state-of-the art and future vision in the general field of MDE for the development and analysis of systems with security requirements, or industrial experiences.

[W8] LowCode: Low-Code Development Platforms

Organizers: Davide Di Ruscio, Dimitris Kolovos, Juan De Lara, Massimo Tisi, and Manuel Wimmer

The growing need for secure, trustworthy, and cost-efficient software as well as recent developments in cloud computing technologies, and the shortage of highly-skilled professional software developers, have given rise to a new generation of low-code software development platforms, such as Google AppMaker (soon AppSheet) and Microsoft PowerApps. Low-code platforms enable the development and deployment of fully-functional applications using mainly visual abstractions and interfaces and requiring little or no procedural code. This makes them accessible to an increasingly digital-native and tech-savvy workforce who can directly and effectively contribute to the software development process, even if they lack a programming background.

At the heart of low-code applications are typically models of the structure, the behaviour and the presentation of the application. Low-code application models need to be edited (using graphical and textual interfaces), validated, version-controlled and eventually transformed or interpreted to deliver user-facing applications. As all of these activities have been of core interest to the MoDELS community over the last two decades, we feel that a workshop on low-code software development at MoDELS is a very natural fit, and an opportunity to attract low-code platform vendors and users to our community, with substantial benefits to be reaped from both sides.

[W9] MoDeVVa: Model Driven Engineering, Verification and Validation

Organizers: Ernesto Posse, Raquel Araujo de Oliveira, Saad Bin Abid, and Iulian Ober

Models are purposeful abstractions of systems and their environments. They can be used to understand, simulate, and validate complex systems at different abstraction levels. Thus, the use of models is of increasing importance for industrial applications. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a development methodology that is based on models, metamodels, and model transformations. The shift from code-centric software develop- ment to model-centric software development in MDE opens up promising opportunities for the verification and validation (V&V) of software. On the other hand, the growing complexity of models and model transformations requires efficient V&V techniques in the context of MDE. The workshop on Model Driven Engineering, Verification and Validation (MoDeVVa) offers a forum for researchers and practitioners who are working on V&V and MDE. The main goals of the workshop are to identify, investigate, and discuss mutual impacts of MDE and V&V. For the 2020 edition of the MoDeVVa workshop we would like to encourage papers addressing the use of AI techniques such as machine learning, to help address the challenges of model- based V&V, while continuing to welcome work in all areas in the intersection between MDE and V&V. Keywords: Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), models, meta- models, model transformations, verification and validation (V&V).

[W10] MULTI: Multi-Level Modelling

Organizers: Bernd Neumayr, Adrian Rutle, and Manuel Wimmer

Multilevel modelling is an emerging new modelling paradigm that offers exciting new perspectives not only for conceptual modelling, but also for the development of software systems that are integrated with models of themselves. Multilevel DSMLs allow for combining the benefits of economies of scale with the productivity enabled by concepts that were designed for very specific domains. Multilevel modelling has now been used successfully in a wide range of projects.

The MULTI workshop series is the premier event for researchers and practitioners who work in the field of multilevel languages and tools or are interested in applying multilevel technologies. It is aimed at providing a platform for exchanging ideas and promoting the further development of multilevel languages, methods and tools. In particular, the goal is to encourage the community to delineate different approaches to multilevel modelling and define objective ways to evaluate their respective strengths/weaknesses.

[W11] MPM4CPS: Multi-Paradigm Modelling for Cyber-Physical Systems

Organizers: Simon Van Mierlo, Moussa Amrani, Dominique Blouin, Manuel Wimmer, and Julien De Antoni

The networked combination of multi-physics systems (mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, biochemical, among others) with computational systems (control systems, signal processing, logical inference, planning, among others), often interacting with human actors, in uncertain environments, in a socio-economic context, has led to so-called Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). The CPS that are engineered today are reaching a previously unseen level of complexity. To date, no unifying theory nor systematic design methods, techniques and tools exist for such systems. Individual (mechanical, electrical, network or software) engineering disciplines only offer partial solutions. Multi-Paradigm Modeling (MPM) proposes to model every part and aspect of such complex systems explicitly, at the most appropriate level(s) of abstraction, using the most appropriate modeling formalism(s). This includes the explicit modeling of the often complex engineering workflows. Modular modeling language engineering, including model transformation and the study of modeling language semantics, are used to realize MPM, which has the potential to be an effective answer to the challenges of designing CPS. This second edition is aimed at furthering the state-of-the-art as well as defining the future directions of this emerging research area by bringing together international experts in the field for an intense one-day workshop.