About

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. MODELS participants originate from a wide variety of backgrounds, including researchers, academics, engineers, and industry professionals.

MODELS 2023 is a forum for participants to share the latest research and practical experiences around modeling, modeling languages, and model-based software and systems engineering. Respective contributions advance the fundamentals of modeling and report applications of modeling in areas such as cyber-physical systems, embedded systems, socio-technical systems, cloud computing, big data, machine learning, security, open source, and sustainability.

Important Dates

Abstract Submission: April 07, 2023
Paper Submission: April 14, 2023
Author responses: June 5–7, 2023
Author notification: June 26, 2023
Camera Ready Due: July 10, 2023

Submission deadlines are hard, i.e., there will be no submission deadline extensions.

Topics of Interest

MODELS 2023 solicits submissions on a variety of topics related to modeling for software and systems engineering including, but not limited to:

• Fundamentals of model-based engineering, including the definition of syntax and semantics of modeling languages and model transformation languages.
• New paradigms, formalisms, applications, approaches, frameworks, or processes for model-based engineering such as low-code/no-code development, digital twins, etc.
• Definition, use, and analysis of model-based generative and re-engineering approaches.
• Model-based monitoring, analysis, and adaptation heading towards intelligent systems.
• Development of model-based systems engineering approaches and modeling-in-the-large, including interdisciplinary engineering and coordination.
• Applications of AI to model-related engineering problems, e.g., search-based and machine-learning approaches.
• Model-based engineering foundations for AI-based systems.
• Human and organizational factors in model-based engineering.
• Tools, meta-tools, and language workbenches for model-based engineering, including model management and scalable model repositories.
• Hybrid multi-modeling approaches, i.e., integration of various modeling languages and their tools.
• Evaluation and comparison of modeling languages, techniques, and tools.
• Quality assurance (analysis, testing, verification) for functional and non-functional properties of models and model transformations.
• Collaborative modeling to address team management issues, e.g., browser-based and cloud-enabled collaboration.
• Evolution of modeling languages and related standards.
• Modeling education, e.g., delivery methods and curriculum design.
• Modeling in software engineering, e.g., applications of models to address common software engineering challenges.
• Modeling for specific challenges such as collaboration, scalability, security, interoperability, adaptability, flexibility, maintainability, dependability, reuse, energy efficiency, sustainability, and uncertainty.
• Modeling with, and for, novel systems and paradigms in fields such as security, cyber-physical systems (CPSs), the Internet of Things, cloud computing, DevOps, blockchain technology, data analytics, data science, machine learning, Big Data, systems engineering, socio-technical systems, critical infrastructures and services, robotics, mobile applications, conversational agents, and open-source software.
• Empirical studies on the application of model-based engineering in areas such as smart manufacturing, smart cities, smart enterprises, smart mobility, smart society, etc.

As in previous years, MODELS 2023 offers two tracks for technical papers: the Foundations Track and the Practice Track. A detailed description of these tracks can be found on the Foundations Track and Practice Track pages respectively.

Accepted Papers

About

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

1. Technical Papers

Technical papers should report on innovative research in modeling or model-driven engineering activities. They should describe a novel contribution to the field and carefully demonstrate the novelty by referencing relevant related literature.

Evaluation Criteria:

Technical papers will be evaluated based on originality, soundness, relevance, significance, strength of validation, quality of presentation, and quality of related work discussions. Submissions must clearly and explicitly describe what is novel about their contribution in comparison to prior work. Results must be validated by formal proofs, rigorous demonstrations (e.g., rigorous case studies or simulations), or empirical evaluations (e.g., controlled experiments or surveys). Authors are strongly encouraged to make the artifacts used for the evaluation publicly available, e.g., via a GitHub repository or an alternative that is expected to provide long-term availability. A respective artifact evaluation process is described below.

2. New Ideas and Vision Papers

New ideas and vision papers describe original, non-conventional research positions in modeling or model-driven engineering and/or approaches that deviate from standard practice. They describe well-defined revolutionary research ideas that are in the early stage of the investigation. They might provide evidence that common wisdom should be challenged, present unifying theories about existing modeling research that can provide new insights or lead to the development of new technologies or approaches, or apply modeling technology to unprecedented application areas.

Evaluation Criteria

New ideas and vision papers will be assessed primarily on their degree of originality and potential for advancing innovation in the field. Submissions must therefore clearly describe shortcomings of the state-of-the-art and the relevance, correctness, and impact of the idea/vision. New ideas and visions need not be fully worked out and a detailed roadmap need not be provided. Authors are strongly encouraged to make any artifacts publicly available, e.g., via a GitHub repository or an alternative that is expected to provide long-term availability. A respective artifact evaluation process is described below.

Artifact Evaluation

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit their accompanying artifacts (e.g., software, datasets, and proofs) to the Artifact Evaluation track to be evaluated by the Artifact Evaluation Committee. Participation in the Artifact Evaluation process is optional and does not affect paper acceptance. Submissions that successfully pass the Artifact Evaluation process will be awarded a seal of approval that will be attached to the papers.

Best Papers

Authors of selected conference papers will be invited to submit revised and extended versions for publication in the International Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM). MODELS 2023 will furthermore award the very best submissions with “best paper” awards by ACM and Springer.

Submission process

The submission process for the MODELS 2023 Foundations Track follows a double-anonymous review process in which authors will not be identified to reviewers and reviewers will not be identified to authors. Thus, no submission may reveal the identity of its authors and authors must make every effort to comply with the double-anonymous review process. Please consult the submission information section below to prepare your manuscript for the double-anonymous process. Papers must be submitted electronically through the MODELS 2023 EasyChair web page.

• Technical papers must not exceed 10 pages for the main text, including all figures, tables, appendices, etc. Two more pages containing only references are permitted. Note that the page limit applies to the final, non-anonymous version; hence a submitted version cannot exhaust the page limit unless it uses blank space for any author information that was removed.
• New Ideas and Vision papers must not exceed 6 pages for the main text, including all figures, tables, appendices, etc. Two more pages containing only references are permitted. Note that the page limit applies to the final, non-anonymous version; hence a submitted version cannot exhaust the page limit unless it uses blank space for any author information that was removed.
• All submissions must be in PDF format. The page limit is strict; it will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any stage of the process.
• The word limit for abstracts is 250 words.

A double-anonymous review process will be used for the Foundations Track. Therefore, no submission may reveal the identity of the authors. Authors must make every effort to comply with the double-anonymous review process. In particular:

• Authors’ names must not be mentioned in the submission.
• All references to the author’s previous work should be in the third person.
• While authors have the right to upload preprints on ArXiV or similar sites, they should not indicate that the manuscript was submitted to MODELS 2023.
• If data is made available to the program committee (by uploading supplemental material or a link to a repository), this data must also not reveal the identity of the authors.

Submissions must conform to the IEEE formatting instructions:

• LaTeX users need to follow the IEEE LaTeX instructions and use the 8.5 x 11 2-column LaTeX Template; Overleaf users need to use the IEEE Conference Template. Note the information on how to use the LaTeX Bibliography Files
• Word users need to use the 8.5 x 11 2-column Word Template, and choose Times New Roman for the text, author information, and section headings, and Helvetica for the paper title.
• By submitting papers to the MODELS Foundations Track, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and acknowledge the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. In particular, papers submitted to MODELS 2023 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration for MODELS 2023.
• Please note the IEEE Authors Rights and Responsibilities.
• Finally, IEEE requires the use of ORCIDs. LaTeX users should use the “orcidlink” package, “\hypersetup{pdfborder={0 0 0}}”, and “\orcidlink{XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX}” after each author name.

Please contact the Program Chairs if you have any questions about the submission process. Submissions that do not adhere to the stated page limits or violate the formatting guidelines will be desk-rejected without review. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings published by IEEE.

Author Response Period

MODELS 2023 will offer an author response period for submissions that could potentially benefit from improvements, i.e., have reached a sufficient level of support and may potentially be accepted. In this period, authors may optionally consult the reviews and answer specific questions from the program committee that will inform the subsequent decision-making process.

About

The goal of the Practice Track is to bridge the gap between foundational research in Model-Based Engineering (MBE) and needs in practice. We invite authors to submit original contributions that report on the application of MBE solutions in the industry, the public sector, or open-source environments. Examples include:

• Demonstrations of scalable and cost-effective methodologies and tools.
• Case studies or field reports offering valuable insights.
• Comparisons of competing approaches in real-world scenarios.
• Submissions need to communicate the context of the application and the practical importance of the findings. Unlike the application itself, any reported lessons learned or insights gained must be original.

Evaluation Criteria

A paper in the Practice Track will be evaluated primarily on the potential impact of its findings. Specifically:

• The paper must describe the context of the MBE application and what problem it solves/addresses.
• The paper should include a concise explanation of the approaches, techniques, methodologies, and tools used.
• The paper should report on the efficacy of the application, ideally in comparison to alternatives, and/or what new lessons have been learned or insights have been gained.
• Studies that report negative results must include a thorough discussion of the possible causes of the failure and, ideally, provide a perspective on how to address them.

Authors are encouraged to make artifacts publicly available, e.g., via a GitHub repository or an alternative that is expected to provide long-term availability. A respective artifact evaluation process is described below.

Artifact Evaluation

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit their accompanying artifacts (e.g., software and datasets) to the Artifact Evaluation track to be evaluated by the Artifact Evaluation Committee. Participation in the Artifact Evaluation process is optional and does not affect paper acceptance. Submissions that successfully pass the Artifact Evaluation process will be awarded a seal of approval that will be attached to the papers.

Best Papers

Authors of selected conference papers will be invited to submit revised and extended versions for publication in the International Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM). MODELS 2023 may furthermore recognize the very best Practice Track submissions with a “best paper” award.

Submission process

The submission process for the MODELS 2023 Practice Track follows a single-anonymous review process in which author names are identified to reviewers and do not need to be removed from the paper. Please consult the submission information section below to prepare your manuscript.

Papers must be submitted electronically through the MODELS 2023 EasyChair web page.

• Practice papers must not exceed 10 pages for the main text, including all figures, tables, appendices, etc. Two more pages containing only references are permitted.
• All submissions must be in PDF format. The page limit is strict; it will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any stage of the process.
• The word limit for abstracts is 250 words.

Submissions must conform to the IEEE formatting instructions:

• LaTeX users need to follow the IEEE LaTeX instructions and use the 8.5 x 11 2-column LaTeX Template; Overleaf users need to use the IEEE Conference Template. Note the information on how to use the LaTeX Bibliography Files
• Word users need to use the 8.5 x 11 2-column Word Template, and choose Times New Roman for the text, author information, and section headings, and Helvetica for the paper title.
• By submitting papers to the MODELS Foundations Track, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and acknowledge the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. In particular, papers submitted to MODELS 2023 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration for MODELS 2023.
• Please note the IEEE Authors Rights and Responsibilities.
• Finally, IEEE requires the use of ORCIDs. LaTeX users should use the “orcidlink” package, “\hypersetup{pdfborder={0 0 0}}”, and “\orcidlink{XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX}” after each author name.

Please contact the Program Chairs if you have any questions about the submission process. Submissions that do not adhere to the stated page limits or violate the formatting guidelines will be desk-rejected without review. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings published by IEEE.

Author Response Period

MODELS 2023 will offer an author response period for submissions that could potentially benefit from improvements, i.e., have reached a sufficient level of support and may potentially be accepted. In this period, authors may optionally consult the reviews and answer specific questions from the program committee that will inform the subsequent decision-making process.

Uncertainty-aware consistency checking in industrial settings

Authors: Antonio Vallecillo and Robbert Jongeling

Rapid-Prototyping and Early Validation of Software Models through Uniform Integration of Hardware

Authors: Michael Uelschen, Marco Schaarschmidt, and Jannis Budde

Manual Abstraction in the Wild: A Multiple-Case Study on OSS Systems

Authors: Wenli Zhang, Weixing Zhang, Daniel Strüber, and Regina Hebig

Word Embeddings for Model-Driven Engineering

Authors: José Antonio Hernández López, Carlos Durá, and Jesús Sánchez Cuadrado

An extended model-based characterization of fine-grained access control for SQL queries

Authors: Hoàng Nguyễn Phước Bảo and Manuel Clavel

Automated Domain Modeling with Large Language Models: A Comparative Study

Authors: Kua Chen, Yujing Yang, Boqi Chen, José Antonio Hernández López, Gunter Mussbacher, and Dániel Varró

Model-Driven Prompt Engineering

Authors: Robert Clarisó and Jordi Cabot

Incremental Model Transformations with Triple Graph Grammars for Multi-version Models

Authors: Matthias Barkowsky and Holger Giese

gLTSdiff: A Generalized Framework for Structural Comparison of Software Behavior

Authors: Dennis Hendriks and Wytse Oortwijn

OCL Rebuilt, From the Ground Up

Authors: Friedrich Steimann, Robert Clarisó Viladrosa, and Martin Gogolla

An Experimental Evaluation of Conformance Testing Techniques in Active Automata Learning

Authors: Bharat Garhewal and Carlos Diego Nascimento Damasceno

Leveraging modeling concepts and techniques to address challenges in network management

Authors: Nafiseh Kahani, Mojtaba Bagherzadeh, Reza Ahmadi, and Juergen Dingel

Automatic Security-Flaw Detection - Replication and Comparison

Authors: Bernhard J. Berger and Christina Plump

SkeMo: Sketch Modeling for Real-Time Model Component Generation

Authors: Alisha Sharma Chapai and Eric J. Rapos

Variability-aware Neo4j for Analyzing a Graphical Model of a Software Product Line

Authors: Xiang Chen and Joanne Atlee

Timing-Aware Software-in-the-Loop Simulation of Automotive Applications with FMI 3.0

Authors: Srivathsan Ravi, Laura Beermann, Oliver Kotte, Paolo Pazzaglia, Mythreya Vinnakota, Dirk Ziegenbein, and Arne Hamann

Toward a Symbiotic Approach Leveraging Generative AI for Model Drive Engineering

Authors: Vinay Kulkarni, Sreedhar Reddy, Souvik Barat, and Jaya Dutta

A Model-driven Approach for Knowledge-based Engineering of Industrial Digital Twins

Authors: Sushant Vale, Sreedhar Reddy, Sivakumar Subramanian, Subhrojyoti Roy Chaudhuri, Sri Harsha Nistala, Anirudh Deodhar, and Venkataramana Runkana

Applicability of Model Checking for Verifying Spacecraft Operational Designs

Authors: Philipp Chrszon, Paulina Maurer, George Saleip, Sascha Müller, Philipp Fischer, Andreas Gerndt, and Michael Felderer

Digital Twins for Cyber-Biophysical Systems: Challenges and Lessons Learned

Authors: Istvan David, Pascal Archambault, Quentin Wolak, Cong Vinh Vu, Timothé Lalonde, Kashif Riaz, Eugene Syriani, and Houari Sahraoui

On Developing and Operating GLSP-based Web Modeling Tools: Lessons Learned from bigUML

Authors: Haydar Metin and Dominik Bork

Marine Data Observability using KPIs: A MDSE Approach

Authors: Keila Lima, Ludovico Iovino, Maria Teresa Rossi, Rogardt Heldal, Tosin Daniel Oyetoyan, and Martina De Sanctis

Mutation Testing for Temporal Alloy Models

Authors: Ana Jovanovic and Allison Sullivan

Integrating Testing into the Alloy Model Development Workflow

Authors: Allison Sullivan

A Model-driven and Template-based Approach for Requirements Specification

Authors: Ikram Darif, Cristiano Politowski, Ghizlane El Boussaidi, Imen Benzarti, and Sègla Kpodjedo

Lessons Learned Building Tools for Workflow+

Authors: Nicholas Annable, Thomas Chiang, Richard Paige, Mark Lawford, and Alan Wassyng

Experience in Specializing a Generic Realization Language for SPL Engineering at Airbus

Authors: Damien Foures, Mathieu Acher, Olivier Barais, Benoit Combemale, Jean-Marc Jézéquel, and Jörg Kienzle

Model Sensemaking Strategies: Exploiting Meta-Model Patterns to Understand Large Models

Authors: Francisco Martínez-Lasaca, Pablo Díez, Esther Guerra, and Juan De Lara

Automated Grading of Use Cases

Authors: Mohsen Hosseinibaghdadabadi, Omar Alam, Jörg Kienzle, and Nicolas Almerge

EvoSL: A Large Open-Source Corpus of Changes in Simulink Models & Projects

Authors: Sohil Shrestha, Alexander Boll, Shafiul Azam Chowdhury, Timo Kehrer, and Christoph Csallner