About

Contributions related to all aspects of modeling, modeling languages and model-based engineering are cordially invited to the 24th edition of MODELS, in Fukuoka, Japan 10-15 October 2021.

MODELS is the premier conference series for model-based software and systems engineering. Since 1998, MODELS has covered all aspects of modeling, from languages and methods, to tools and applications. Attendees of MODELS come from diverse backgrounds, including researchers, academics, engineers and industrial professionals. MODELS 2021 is a forum for participants to exchange cutting-edge research results and innovative practical experiences around modeling and model-based software and systems.

This year’s edition will provide an opportunity for the modeling community to further advance the foundations of modeling, and come up with innovative applications of modeling in emerging areas of cyber-physical systems, embedded systems, socio-technical systems, cloud computing, big data, machine learning, security, open source, and sustainability.

In 2021, MODELS has a special theme on “Modeling for Human-AI Collaborative Society”. We especially encourage contributions where model-driven engineering intersects with research and applications on, not exclusively, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, smart cities, robot ethics and value-based Software Engineering.

We invite you to join us at MODELS 2021, Fukuoka, Japan and to help shape the modelling methods and technologies of the future!

Accepted Papers

Practice and Innovation Track

The goal of this track is to fill the gap between foundational research in model-based engineering (MBE) and industrial needs. We invite authors from academia and/or industry to submit original contributions reporting on the development of innovative MBE solutions in industries, public sector, or open-source settings, as well as innovative application of MBE in such contexts. Examples include:

• Scalable and cost-effective methodologies and tools
• Industrial case studies with valuable lessons learned
• Experience reports providing novel insights

Each paper should provide clear take-away value by describing the context of a problem of practical importance, and the application of MBE that leads to a solution.

Evaluation Criteria: A paper in the P&I Track will be evaluated mainly from its practical take-away and the potential impact of the findings. More specifically, The paper should discuss why the solution to the problem is innovative (e.g., in terms of advancing the state-of-practice), effective, and/or efficient, and what likely practical impact it has or will have; The paper should provide a concise explanation of approaches, techniques, methodologies and tools employed; The paper should explain best practices that emerged, tools developed, and/or software processes involved. Studies reporting on negative findings must provide a thorough discussion of the potential causes of failure, and ideally a perspective on how to solve them.

Submission Process

The submission process for MODELS 2021 is similar to past MODELS conferences, with the specific details below. We follow a single blind review process for the Practice and Innovation Track. In a single blind process, authors’ names are identified to the reviewers and do not need to be removed from the paper. Please consult the submission information section below to prepare your manuscript accordingly.

Submission Guidelines

For the Practice and Innovation track, papers must be submitted electronically through the MODELS Practice and Innovation 2021 EasyChair web page.

• Practice and Innovation track papers must not exceed 10 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc. Two more pages containing only references are permitted.
• All submissions must be in PDF. The page limit is strict, and it will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any point in the process (including after the paper is accepted).
• Submissions must adhere to the IEEE formatting instructions, which can be found at: IEEE - Manuscript Templates for Conference Proceedings
• The Practice and Innovation Track of MODELS 2021 will use a single-blind review process (i.e., authors do not have to hide their identities in their papers). Since industry papers typically rely heavily on the industrial/practical context in which the work was carried out, anonymizing the context may negatively impact the paper.
• Please contact the Program Chairs if you have more questions.

Submissions that do not adhere to these limits or that violate the formatting guidelines will be desk-rejected without review. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings published by IEEE. Selected papers from the conference will be invited to revise and submit extended versions of the papers for publication in the International Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM).

Important Dates

Foundation Track and Practice and Innovation Track have the following deadlines:

• April 30, 2021, Abstract submission
• May 7, 2021, Paper submission
• July 12, 2021, Author notification
• July 31, 2021, Camera Ready Due

Please note that:

• Abstract submission is mandatory.
• All deadlines are hard. No extensions will be granted.
• All dates are according to time zone “Anywhere on Earth”, i.e., UTC-12.
• All accepted papers must be presented by an author who is registered as a “Regular” participant (student presenters must register as a Regular participant).

Attendance

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to attend the conference and present the paper in person.

Production of artifacts

After the notification, the authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit artifacts related to the paper to be evaluated by the Artifact Evaluation Committee.

Foundations Track

We invite authors to submit high quality contributions describing significant, original, and unpublished results in the following categories:

1. Technical Papers

   Technical papers should describe innovative research in modeling or model-based engineering activities. Papers in this submission category should describe a novel contribution to the field and should carefully support claims of novelty with citations to the relevant literature.

   Evaluation Criteria: Technical papers are evaluated on the basis of originality, soundness, relevance, importance of contribution, strength of validation, quality of presentation and appropriate comparison to related work. Where a submission builds upon previous work of the author(s), the novelty of the new contribution must be described clearly with respect to the previous work. Technical papers need to discuss clearly how the results were validated (e.g., formal proofs, controlled experiments, empirical studies, rigorous case studies, or simulations). Authors are strongly encouraged to make the artifacts used for the evaluation publicly accessible, e.g., through a GitHub repository or an alternative that is likely to remain available. There will be an artifact evaluation process, as discussed below.

2. New Ideas and Vision Papers.

   We solicit short papers that present new ideas and visions. Such papers may describe new, unconventional model-driven engineering research positions or approaches that depart from standard practice. They can describe well-defined research ideas that are at an early stage of investigation. They could also provide new evidence to challenge common wisdom, present new unifying theories about existing modeling research that provides novel insight or that can lead to the development of new technologies or approaches, or apply modeling technology to radically new application areas.

   Evaluation Criteria: New ideas and vision papers will be assessed primarily on their level of originality and potential for impact on the field in terms of promoting innovative thinking. Hence, inadequacies in the state-of-the-art and the pertinence, correctness, and impact of the idea/vision must be described clearly, even though the new idea need not be fully worked out, and a fully detailed roadmap need not be presented.

Submission Process

The submission process for MODELS 2021 is similar to past MODELS conferences, with the specific details below. We follow a double blind review process for the Foundations Track. “New Ideas and Vision Papers” should be submitted to the Foundations Track as short papers as mentioned below. In the double blind review process, authors will not be identified to reviewers and reviewers will not be identified to authors. Please consult the submission information section below to prepare your manuscript accordingly.

Submission Guidelines

For the Foundations track, papers must be submitted electronically through the MODELS Foundation 2021 EasyChair web page.

• Technical papers must not exceed 10 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc. Two more pages containing only references are permitted.
• “New Ideas/Vision” papers must not exceed 6 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc. One more page containing only references is permitted.
• All submissions must be in PDF. The page limit is strict, and it will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any point in the process (including after the paper is accepted).
• Submissions must adhere to the IEEE formatting instructions, which can be found at: IEEE - Manuscript Templates for Conference Proceedings

• The Foundations Track of MODELS 2021 will use a double-blind review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-blind review process. In particular, the authors’ names must be omitted from the submission and references to their prior work should be in the third person. For more information, check the submission information page.

• Please contact the Program Chairs if you have more questions.

Submissions that do not adhere to these limits or that violate the formatting guidelines will be desk-rejected without review. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings published by IEEE. Selected papers from the conference will be invited to revise and submit extended versions of the papers for publication in the International Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM).

Important Dates

Foundation Track and Practice and Innovation Track have the following deadlines:

• April 30, 2021, Abstract submission
• May 7, 2021, Paper submission
• July 12, 2021, Author notification
• July 31, 2021, Camera Ready Due

Please note that:

• Abstract submission is mandatory.
• All deadlines are hard. No extensions will be granted.
• All dates are according to time zone “Anywhere on Earth”, i.e., UTC-12.
• All accepted papers must be presented by an author who is registered as a “Regular” participant (student presenters must register as a Regular participant).

Submission Information

The Foundations Track of MODELS 2021 will follow a double-blind reviewing process in which the identity of authors will not be known to the program committee at any time during the process. The papers submitted must not reveal the authors´ identities in any way. Hence, the authors should make every reasonable effort to keep the paper anonymous, but of course there is no need to guarantee that the authors’ identity is undiscoverable.

Why Double Blind?

There are many reasons for a double-blind review process at conferences, including to avoid (even unconscious) bias from the reviewers. Hence, to make the review process as fair as possible, we want to avoid either positive or negative bias of reviewers from the authors’ identities. Recently, many conferences have moved to a double blind process to avoid such bias, including ICSE, ICSME, FASE, ESEC/FSE, and ASE, among many others. For more information on motivations for double-blind reviewing, see Claire Le Goues’s very well argued, referenced and evidenced blog posting in favor of double-blind review processes for Software Engineering conferences. See also a list of double-blind resources from Robert Feldt, as well as a more formal study of the subject by Moritz Beller and Alberto Bacchelli, as well as studies on the benefits of double blind in merit reviewing. How to prepare your paper for double-blind reviewing?

• Omit all authors’ names and affiliations from the title page. Omit also acknowledgements, if they mention any names or organizations.
• Refer to your own work in the third person. You should not change the names of your own previously published tools, approaches, or systems, because this would clearly compromise the review process. Instead, refer to the authorship or provenance of tools, approaches, or systems in the third person, so that it is credible that another author could have written your paper.
• If possible, do not rely on external sources for supplementary material (your website, your GitHub repository, your YouTube channel, a companion technical report or thesis) in the paper. Such material might reveal author identities. It is possible to post a link to an anonymous GitHub repository, or anonymous web hosting services, but the repository should be checked carefully for any information that could reveal the author’s identity, and it could be helpful to warn the reader that accessing the repository could reveal the author’s identity. In any case, you will be able to submit supplementary material through the EasyChair submission site, but check the material carefully for anything that can reveal the author’s identity. Here are some additional tips on anonymization from ACM.

Authors having further questions on double blind reviewing are encouraged to contact the Program Chairs by email. Papers that do not comply to the double blind review process will be desk-rejected.

Attendance

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to attend the conference and present the paper in person.

Production of artifacts

After the notification, the authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit artifacts related to the paper to be evaluated by the Artifact Evaluation Committee.

Foundation Track Practice & Innovation Track

Foundation Track

Execution Trace Analysis for a Precise Understanding of Latency Violations

Maysam Zoor and Ludovic Apvrille.

Towards the Characterization of Realistic Model Generators using Graph Neural Networks

Jose Antonio Hernandez Lopez and Jesus Sanchez Cuadrado.

Quality Guidelines for Research Artifacts in Model-Driven Engineering

Carlos Diego Damasceno and Daniel Struber.

Efficient Replay-based Regression Testing for Distributed Reactive Systems in the Context of Model-driven Development

Majid Babaei and Juergen Dingel.

Collaborative Model-Driven Software Engineering: A Systematic Update

Istvan David, Kousar Aslam, Sogol Faridmoayer, Ivano Malavolta, Eugene Syriani and Patricia Lago.

Monte Carlo Tree Search and GR(1) Synthesis for Robot Tasks Planning in Automotive Production Lines

Eric Roslin Wete Poaka, Andreas Wortmann, Joel Greenyer, Oliver Flegel and Martin Klein.

Towards Control Flow Analysis of Declarative Graph Transformations with Symbolic Execution

Florian Simon Ege and Matthias Tichy.

Collaborative Software Modeling in Virtual Reality

Enes Yigitbas, Simon Gorissen, Nils Weidmann and Gregor Engels.

Exploring Architectural Design Decisions in Industry 4.0: A Literature Review and Taxonomy

Tarik Terzimehic, Kirill Dorofeev and Sebastian Voss.

A Concept for a Qualifiable (Meta)-Modeling Framework Deployable in Systems and Tools of Safety-critical and Cyber-physical Environments

Vanessa Tietz, Julian Schoepf, Andreas Waldvogel and Bjoern Annighoefer.

Towards Reinforcement Learning for In-Place Model Transformations

Martin Eisenberg, Hans-Peter Pichler, Antonio Garmendia and Manuel Wimmer.

A Lean Approach to Building Valid Model-Based Safety Arguments

Torin Viger, Logan Murphy, Alessio Di Sandro, Ramy Shahin and Marsha Chechik.

MoDALAS: Model-Driven Assurance for Learning-Enabled Autonomous Systems

Michael Langford, Kenneth Chan, Jonathon Fleck, Philip McKinley and Betty Cheng.

A GNN-based Recommender System to Assist the Specification of Metamodels and Models

Juri Di Rocco, Claudio Di Sipio, Davide Di Ruscio and Phuong T. Nguyen.

Automated Patch Generation for Fixing Semantic Errors in ATL Transformation Rules

Zahra Varaminybahnemiry, Jessie Galasso, Khalid Belharbi and Houari Sahraoui.

Identifying Metamodel Inaccurate Structures During Metamodel/Constraints Co-Evolution

Elyes Cherfa, Soraya Kesraoui, Chouki Tibermacine, Regis Fleurquin and Salah Sadou.

Model-Driven Simulation-Based Analysis for Multi-Robot Systems

James Harbin, Simos Gerasimou, Nicholas Matragkas, Athanasios Zolotas and Radu Calinescu.

Scalable N-Way Model Matching Using Multi-Dimensional Search Trees

Alexander Schultheis, Paul Maximilian Bittner, Lars Grunske, Thomas Thum and Timo Kehrer.

Practice & Innovation Track

OSTRICH - A Safe Template Language for Low-code Development

Hugo Lourenco, Carla Ferreira and Joao Costa Seco.

Leveraging Model-Driven Technologies for JSONArtefacts: The Shipyard Case Study

Alessandro Colantoni, Antonio Garmendia, Luca Berardinelli, Manuel Wimmer and Johannes Braeuer.

Identifying manual changes to generated code: Experiences from the industrial automation domain

Robbert Jongeling, Sachin Bhatambrekar, Anders Lofberg, Antonio Cicchetti, Federico Ciccozzi and Jan Carlson.

On designing applied DSLs for non-programming experts in evolving domains

Holger Borum, Henning Niss and Peter Sestoft.

Model-Based Development of Engine Control Systems: Experiences and Lessons Learnt

Justin Cooper, Alfonso de la Vega, Richard Paige, Dimitris Kolovos, Michael Bennett, Caroline Brown, Beatriz Sanchez Pina and Horacio Hoyos Rodriguez.

Restricted Natural Language and Model-based Adaptive Test Generation for Autonomous Driving

Yize Shi, Chengjie Lu, Man Zhang, Huihui Zhang, Tao Yue and Shaukat Ali.

Assessing the Usefulness of a Visual Programming IDE for Large-Scale Automation Software

Bianca Wiesmayr, Alois Zoitl and Rick Rabiser.

Synthesizing Verified Components for Cyber Assured Systems Engineering

Konrad Slind, Junaid Babar, Eric Mercer, Isaac Amundson and David Hardin.

Designing a Modeling Language for Customer Journeys: Lessons Learned from User Involvement

Ragnhild Halvorsrud, Costas Boletsis and Enrique Garcia-Ceja.

DataTime: a framework to smoothly integrate past, present and future into models

Lyan Gauthier, Jean-Marc Jezequel, Benoit Combemale and David Gross-Amblard.

Integrated and Iterative Requirements Analysis and Test Specification: A Case Study at Kostal

Carsten Wiecher, Jannik Fischbach, Joel Greenyer, Andreas Vogelsang, Carsten Wolff and Roman Dumitrescu.

Repository Mining for Changes in Simulink Models

Monika Jaskolka, Vera Pantelic, Alan Wassyng, Mark Lawford and Richard Paige.

Applying Declarative Analysis to Software Product Line Models: An Industrial Study

Ramy Shahin, Rob Hackman, Rafael Toledo, Ramesh S., Jo Atlee and Marsha Chechik.

MODELS 2021’s review will use a two phase process with early rejection and an optional author’s response.

Phase 1:

• In the first phase, all papers that conform to the submission guidelines will be peer-reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee.
• The review of each paper will be continuously monitored by one Program Board member. The Program Chairs will also be heavily involved in monitoring discussions and reviews to ensure that constructive and sufficiently detailed reviews are produced.
• After reviews are completed, Program Board members will lead discussions on papers assigned to them, in order to come up with initial recommendations.
• Papers with at least one supporter will progress to the second phase. Early reject notifications will be sent to papers without any supporting reviews.

Phase 2:

• At the beginning of the second phase, the Program Board may ask the authors to provide brief clarifications to the most critical questions or concerns raised by the reviewers as part of a lightweight (and optional) Authors’ Response period.
• The authors may opt out from the author response phase upon the submission of their paper. In this case, they will not receive any author response requests from the Program Board.
• All remaining papers (with or without authors’ responses) will be extensively discussed in an extended discussion phase by the responsible Program Board and Program Committee members to reach a final recommendation based on consensus.
• All these recommendations will be discussed at the Program Board meeting, to be held in early July 2021, in order to come up with final decisions on which papers will be presented at the conference.
• The Program Committee, the Program Board and the Program Chairs are committed during the entire process to provide sufficiently detailed feedback so that authors can both improve their papers and understand the rationale behind final decisions.

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit their accompanying artifacts (e.g., software, datasets, proofs) to the Artifact Evaluation track. The Artifact Evaluation track is run by a separate committee whose task is to assess how the artifacts support the results presented in the papers. Participation in the Artifact Evaluation process is optional and does not affect the final decision regarding the papers. Papers that successfully go through the Artifact Evaluation process will be rewarded with a seal of approval printed on the paper themselves. The artifacts will be archived.