About

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. 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.

Following the tradition of previous conferences, MODELS 2022 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 discussions 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 presentations of papers (favoring the attendance of young researchers) and discussions. 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.

New this year: Best Theme Paper Award

This year’s conference will feature a Best Theme Paper Award spanning across all tracks. The special theme of this year’s conference is “Modeling for social good” #MDE4SG. Workshops provide an excellent opportunity to contribute to this theme, as workshop papers tend to be more exploratory and easier to steer towards new avenues.

We encourage researchers to submit papers related to the special theme, regardless of the workshop they are submitting their paper to. We also encourage prospective workshop organizers to reflect on this theme in their workshop proposals. Workshop proposals on related topics—such as socio-technical systems, tools with social impact, integrating human values, data science, and intelligent systems—are especially welcome.

Workshop proposals should accommodate the following selection criteria and process for the Best Theme Paper Award.

• A paper must be at least 5 pages long to be eligible.
• Each workshop can nominate one candidate paper. This is optional, as not every workshop will be able to nominate a paper. We suggest you include the way of selection in your workshop proposals, and decide upon the actual nomination, or lack thereof, once the workshop PC has reviewed the submitted papers.
• The workshop chairs will select one paper out of the candidate papers, and nominate it to the Selection Committee.

For more information, please refer to the Best Theme Paper Award page.

Submission Process

Submit your workshop proposal electronically in PDF using the Springer LNCS style through the MODELS EasyChair submission site.

Please adhere to the workshop proposal guidelines below, providing every requested information about the proposed workshop, using at most five pages. Please include the one-page draft of your planned Call for Papers to the proposal (not included in the five pages). In order to ensure proper coordination with the deadlines of the main conference, the deadlines specified in Important Dates below have to be respected by your plan for your workshop.

An Overleaf template with the suggested structure is available here. (This is a read-only link. In order to work with it, you need to make a copy of it.)

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.

Word users make sure you are using Times New Roman on the body of your text, author information, and section titles; and using Helvetica on the paper title.

Important Dates

• Workshop Proposal Submissions Deadline: March 25 April 1, 2022
• Workshop Proposal Acceptance Notification: April 18 April 25, 2022
• Submissions deadline: July 20, 2022
• Notification of authors: August 19, 2022
• Camera-ready deadline: August 26 September 9, 2022
• Workshop dates: October 23-25, 2022

Contact

For any information, please contact the workshops co-chairs at: models2022workshops@easychair.org.

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
   • Topics of interest
   • 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’21 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
   • Workshops are expected to adhere to the timing provided by the main conference by default
   • 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. Best Theme Paper Award selection process
   • One paragraph on the selection process in case the workshop organizers want to participate. The conference strongly encourages all workshops to participate. In order to be able to nominate a paper, it is suggested that the special theme is properly emphasized in the workshop proposal.
   • Please choose an approach that fits your community the best. For example: the OC can select the nominated paper; the PC and reviewers can be included in the decision, etc.
6. COVID-related measures
   • How do you plan to react should the conference go virtual once again?
   • Would you like to organize the workshop despite the virtual format? Does your workshop require an in-person format?
   • What changes would a switch to a virtual format necessitate?
   • What is the latest you can safely convert your workshop to a virtual (or hybrid) setting?
7. 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] 4th Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Model-driven Engineering (MDEIntelligence)

Organizers: Dominik Bork, Lola Burgueño, Phuong Nguyen 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 development 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 highly complex software systems engineers will have to design tomorrow. This workshop will be the opportunity to discuss how to choose, evaluate and adapt AI techniques to Model-Driven Engineering (AI for MDE) as a way to improve current system and software modelling and generation processes while, at the same time, increasing the benefits and reducing the costs of adopting MDE. AI is software (and complex software, in fact) that can benefit from an MDE approach in its design and development and specially w.r.t. the challenge of designing “trustable” AI software. Thus, MDE for AI is also clearly in the scope of the proposed workshop. We take a broad view of AI to include any kind of technique that provides human cognitive capabilities and helps creating “intelligent” software.

[W2] 9th International Workshop on Multi-Level Modelling (MULTI 2022)

Organizers: Manfred Jeusfeld, Juan De Lara and Gergely Mezei

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.

[W3] 2nd International Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering for Digital Twins (ModDiT’22)

Organizers: Francis Bordeleau, Loek Cleophas, Benoit Combemale, Romina Eramo, Mark van den Brand and Andreas Wortmann

Digital twin (DT) is an emerging concept that is gaining attention in many disciplines to support engineering, monitoring, controlling, and optimizing cyber-physical systems (CPSs). It refers to the ability to clone an actual system into a virtual counterpart that reflects all the important properties and characteristics of the original system within a specific application context. While benefits of DT have been demonstrated in many contexts, their development, maintenance, and evolution yield major challenges. Part of these need to be addressed from a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) perspective. MoDDiT’22 aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners on DTs to shape the future of systematically designing, engineering, evolving, maintaining, and evaluating DTs across different disciplines.

[W4] International workshop Models and Evolution

Organizers: Ludovico Iovino, Alfonso Pierantonio and Dalila Tamzalit

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.

[W5] Modeling in Automotive System and Software Engineering (MASE’22)

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

The development of modern automotive systems is a formidable challenge. 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.

[W6] Model Driven Engineering, Verification and Validation (MoDeVVa’22)

Organizers: Saad Bin Abid, Iulian Ober, Akram Idani and Pierre de Saqui-Sannes

The workshop on Model Driven Engineering, Verification and Validation (MoDeVVa) offers a forum for researchers and practitioners who are working on verification and validation (V&V) in Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and Model Driven software Engineering (MDE). The main goals of the workshop are to identify, investigate, and discuss emerging research in the mutual impacts of model-based engineering and V&V.

[W7] 5th International Workshop on Multi-Paradigm Modeling for Cyber-Physical Systems (MPM4CPS)

Organizers: Moussa Amrani, Dominique Blouin, Moharram Challenger, Robert Heinrich, Joeri Exelmans and Randy Paredis

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 fourth 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.

[W8] Modeling Language Engineering (MLE)

Organizers: Erwan Bousse, Faezeh Khorram and Juha-Pekka Tolvanen

Modeling is a key paradigm to successfully engineer software-intensive systems in collaboration with experts from diverse domains. These experts use domain-specific concepts, notations, and paradigms, that need to be expressed in suitable, domain-specific modeling languages. Conceiving, engineering, evolving, and maintaining domain-specific modeling languages, hence, is crucial to handle increasing complexity of software-intensive systems. Consequently, modeling language engineering is vital to the success of modeling in particular and the engineering of these systems in general. The proposed MLE workshop will be a full-day workshop aiming at bringing together researchers and practitioners in the language and modeling language engineering communities to discuss the challenges associated with the engineering of modeling languages as well as their integration. Following five editions of the GEMOC workshop, four of the EXE workshop, and three joint editions as the MLE workshop, this edition will continue the success of MLE and, again, attract a large number of interested participants from the MODELS community.

[W9] DevOps@MODELS

Organizers: Francis Bordeleau, Juergen Dingel, Nan Messe and Sébastien Mosser

In the last decade, DevOps has emerged as the prominent approach to increase productivity and system quality in the software industry. It focuses on optimizing the flow of activities involved in the creation of end user value, from idea to deployed functionality and operating systems. It leverages different software development paradigms and techniques such as continuous integration and deployment/ delivery, runtime monitoring (telemetry), analytics, automated testing, and self-adaptiveness. However, in spite of its popularity, many elements of existing DevOps processes remain manual and DevOps still lacks proper engineering frameworks to support continuous improvement. Classically, many aspects of DevOps are still implemented in a handmade way by DevOps engineers, and there is no formal support to validate the defined environment, even if they are critical in the product life-cycle. Model-driven engineering (MDE) aims at increasing productivity and systems quality through the use of models that are understandable and actionable. It enables the use of analysis and generation techniques to automate different parts of the development process. The MDE approach relies on pillars such as dedicated languages definition, formal model reasoning or code generation.

[W10] Low-Code Development Platforms

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

Cloud-based low-code development platforms such as Google’s App- Sheet, Microsoft’s PowerApps, OutSystems and Mendix have become increasingly popular over the last few years, owing to an increasing demand for bespoke, cost-efficient and reliable data-intensive (e.g., back-office) software solutions. Low-code platforms are model-driven at their heart and hence closer interaction and cross-pollination is found to be highly beneficial for the low-code and model-driven engineering communities. The LowCode 2022 workshop aims to bring together vendors and users of low-code platforms with model-driven engineering researchers and practitioners, and to explore opportunities for technology and experience transfer, and collaboration between them.

[W11] International Workshop on OCL and Textual Modeling (OCL’22)

Organizers: Daniel Calegari, Robert Clarisó and Edward Willink

Modeling started with UML and its precursors as a graphical notation. Such visual representations enable direct intuitive capturing of reality, but some of their features are difficult to formalize and lack the level of precision required to create complete and unambiguous specifications. Limitations of the graphical notations encouraged the development of text-based modeling languages that either integrate with or replace graphical notations for modeling. Typical examples of such languages are OCL, textual MOF, Epsilon, and Alloy. Textual modeling languages have their roots in formal language paradigms like logic, programming and databases. The goal of this workshop is to create a forum where researchers and practitioners interested in building models using OCL or other kinds of textual languages can directly interact, report advances, share results, identify tools for language development, and discuss appropriate standards. The close interaction will enable researchers and practitioners to identify common interests and topics for potential cooperation.

[W12] Sixth International Workshop on Human Factors in Modeling / Modeling of Human Factors (HuFaMo’22)

Organizers: Silvia Abrahao, Timothy C. Lethbridge, Emmanuel Renaux and Bran Selic

Studying human factors and experiences in modeling helps improve knowledge of the modeling process, adoption of modeling, optimization of system outcomes and user well-being. Incorporating human aspects into early stages of software engineering processes is essential to better support the stakeholders, including end-users of the software. The HuFaMo workshop was established in 2015 to promote this form of research by creating a venue to discuss and disseminate these topics. The workshop originally aimed at studying human factors for software systems allowing humans to model. The first four editions of the workshop enabled significant progress on this issue. Last year, we expanded the scope of the workshop to also consider the modeling of human factors during the design of software. This helps to study all types of relationships that modeling and human factors can have “and their impact on processes, products, and end-users as well as others that might be affected by the system”. Thanks to the previous editions of HuFaMo, a community of researchers and practitioners has formed and has broadened the foothold of human factors research in the Model-based engineering community. With the 2022 edition, we aim to strengthen this community by maintaining the principle of sharing experiences through proposals and reports on human factors in modeling and design as well as modeling and design of human factors. HuFaMo invites reports of completed research, work in progress with promising early results, and proposals of study designs.