About

Following the tradition of previous conferences, MODELS 2023 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, conduct intensive discussions on a particular topic, or 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.

Submission process

Submit your workshop proposal electronically in PDF using the MODELS EasyChair submission site.

Please adhere to the workshop proposal guidelines, 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 in 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 published by the IEEE 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.

Submissions must adhere to the IEEE formatting instructions, which can be found here. 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 as the main tracks of the Conference.

Contact

For any information, please contact the workshops co-chairs at models23workshops@easychair.org

Accepted Papers

[W1] International Workshop on Models and Evolution 2023: Sustainability

Organizers: Ludovico Iovino, Istvan David, and Djamel Eddine Khelladi

Model artifacts are subject to constant evolution throughout the lifecycle of modern systems. These dynamics necessitate proper theories, techniques and tools to ensure correctness, consistency, and high quality across the trajectory of evolution. The Models and Evolution workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss the latest developments around the topic of model evolution. Recognizing that artifact evolution is a key enabler of technical sustainability—a highly desired property of complex systems—this year’s edition promotes sustainability to its special theme and extends the traditional scope of the workshop accordingly.

[W2] 5th International Workshop on Multi-Paradigm Modeling for Cyber-Physical Systems (MPM4CPS)

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

Tackling the complexity involved in developing truly complex, designed systems is a topic of intense research and development. System complexity has drastically increased once software components were introduced in the form of embedded systems, controlling physical parts of the system, and has only grown in CPS, where the networking aspect of the systems and their environment are also considered. The complexity faced when engineering CPS is mostly due to the plethora of cross-disciplinary design alternatives and inter-domain interactions. To date, no unifying theory nor system design methods, techniques, or tools to design, analyze, and ultimately deploy CPS exist. Individual (physical systems, software, network) engineering disciplines offer only partial solutions and are no match for CPS complexity.

Multi-Paradigm Modeling (MPM) offers a foundational framework for gluing several disciplines together in a consistent way. The inherent complexity of CPS is broken down into the most appropriate views and architectures, at the most appropriate levels of abstraction, and expressed in appropriate modeling formalisms, each with precisely defined semantics. Often complex, collaborative workflows are modeled explicitly too. MPM aims to provide processes and tools that can combine, couple, and integrate the many concerns that define a system.

MPM encompasses many research topics: from language engineering (for DSLs, including their (visual/textual) syntax and semantics), to processes to support multi-view and multi-abstraction modeling, simulation for full-system analysis, and deployment. The added complexity that CPS brings compared to embedded and software-intensive systems requires consideration of how MPM techniques can be applied or adapted to these new applications, tying together multiple domains. Many remaining research questions require answers from researchers in different domains, as well as a unified effort from researchers who work on supporting techniques and technologies. The community needs a workshop setting to meet up and align past and future research activities.

[W3] 10th International Workshop on Multi-Level Modeling (MULTI 2023)

Organizers: Thomas Kühne, Zoltán Theisz, and Manfred Jeusfeld

The MULTI workshop series is the premier venue for researchers and practitioners working on multi-level modeling and multi-level software development. Multi-level modeling represents a new object-oriented paradigm for both conceptual modeling and software engineering. In contrast to conventional two-level approaches, it supports an unbounded number of classification levels and introduces concepts and mechanisms that foster reuse, adaptability, and control. While multi-level languages and tools have reached considerable maturity, the field still offers numerous challenges.

The MULTI workshop series aims at providing a platform for exchanging ideas and promoting further development of multi-level languages, methods, and tools. A particular goal is to encourage the community to, beyond proposing new approaches, analyze different approaches to multi-level modeling and define objective ways to evaluate their respective strengths and weaknesses. Non-exclusive workshop themes in 2023 will be multi-level modeling in education and understanding industry needs.

[W4] 2nd International Hands-on Workshop on Collaborative Modeling (HoWCoM)

Organizers: Istvan David, Antonio Garcia-Dominguez, and Eugene Syriani

Collaboration is often seen as an enabling technique and a tool-related aspect of MDE. Yet, collaborative modeling has typically been addressed at the foundations level, and the hands-on evaluation of tools has been lacking. We are proposing the second edition of an innovative workshop format to fill this gap. The workshop brings together collaborative tool developers with an actively involved audience, who will test and evaluate the tools during hands-on sessions. After the first, virtual edition of the workshop in 2021, we will now test the format in a physically co-located fashion. Reacting to the needs of participants in 2021, the workshop now solicits traditional workshop papers as well.

[W5] MDE Intelligence: 5th Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Model-driven Engineering

Organizers: Lola Burgueño, Dominik Bork, Jessie Galasso and Manuel Wimmer

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 higher-quality systems and software more efficiently 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 modeling and generation processes while, at the same time, increasing the benefits and reducing the costs of adopting MDE. Furthermore, AI is software (and complex software, in fact) that can benefit from an MDE approach in its design and development and especially w.r.t. the challenge of designing “trustable” AI software. Thus, MDE for AI is also in the scope of the proposed workshop. Finally, we aim to take a broad view of AI to include any kind of technique that provides human cognitive capabilities and helps to create “intelligent” software.

[W6] 7th International Workshop on Human Factors in Modeling / Modeling of Human Factors (HuFaMo’ 23)

Organizers: Arnaud Blouin, Silvia Abrahão, Philippe Palanque 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 the 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. Two years ago, we expanded the scope of the workshop to also consider the modeling of human factors during the design of the 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 2023 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, tool papers, and proposals of study designs.

[W7] International Workshop on OCL and Textual Modeling (OCL’2023)

Organizers: Robert Clarisó and Lars Hamann

Modeling started out with UML and its precursors as a graphical notation. Such visual representations enable direct intuitive capturing of reality, but they have weaknesses: for example, detailed visual representations bear the risk of becoming overcrowded faster than textual models and some of the visual features lack the level of precision required to create complete and unambiguous specifications. These weaknesses of 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 provide a space for interactions 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. In particular, the workshop will encourage discussions for achieving synergy from different modeling language concepts and modeling language use. The close interaction will enable researchers and practitioners to identify common interests and options for potential cooperation.

[W8] Modeling Language Engineering (MLE) Workshop

Organizers: Ed Seidewitz, Arnaud Blouin and Jérôme Pfeiffer

Modeling is a key paradigm to successfully engineering software-intensive systems in collaboration with experts from diverse domains. These experts need to have relevant concepts, notations, and paradigms expressible in suitable modeling languages. Conceiving, engineering, evolving, and maintaining both general and domain-specific modeling languages, hence, is crucial to handle the 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 four joint editions of the MLE workshop, this edition will continue the success of MLE and, again, attract interested participants from across the MODELS community.

[W9] MoDeVVa’23: Model Driven Engineering, Verification and Validation

Organizers: Saadbin Abid, Akram Idani, Iulian Ober, 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 discuss the state of practice in V&V approaches in MBSE/MDE, and to identify, investigate and discuss emerging research in the mutual impacts of model-based engineering and V&V.

[W10] MoDDiT’23: 3rd International Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering for Digital Twins

Organizers: Tony Clark, Loek Cleophas, Romina Eramo, Vinay Kulkarni, and Manuel Wimmer

Digital twin (DT) is a concept that is gaining growing attention in many disciplines to support engineering, monitoring, controlling, and optimizing cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and beyond. 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 the benefits of DT have been demonstrated in many contexts, their development, maintenance, and evolution, yield major challenges. Part of these needs to be addressed from a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) perspective. MoDDiT’23 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.

[W11] 4th International Workshop on Modeling in Low-Code Development Platforms

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

Cloud-based low-code development platforms (e.g., by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, OutSystems, and Mendix) have become increasingly popular over the last few years, owing to 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 are found to be highly beneficial for the low-code and model-driven engineering communities. The LowCode 2023 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.

[W12] Working Session on a Common Architecture/Infrastructure for Modelling Tools for Teaching

Organizers: Jörg Kienzle, William Barnett and Steffen Zschaler

Modeling is a crucial aspect in many different software fields and beyond. It enables designers and engineers to efficiently explore the design space, and provides stakeholders with suitable representations of the system under study. Models are crucial in helping all involved parties understand, analyze, and design complex (software) systems. In fact, modeling is often considered to be the foundation of software development. However, there is an increasing difficulty of teaching modeling due to the challenge of creating tools that are necessary for the process. The main goal of this working session is to promote productive discussions regarding the necessary infrastructure and a common reference architecture for modeling tools primarily intended for educational purposes. There will not be any written submissions or published proceedings for the session. Instead, a selection of representatives will give five-minute presentations on their modeling tool experiences in education that will prioritize discussions for the rest of the day.

[W13] 1st Workshop on Model-based Systems Engineering

Organizers: Juergen Dingel, Reza Ahmadi, Francis Bordeleau, Sebastien Mosser, and Jean-Michel Bruel.

Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is a systems engineering paradigm that promotes the systematic use of models throughout the engineering process. It has emerged as a promising approach for developing complex systems in a cost-effective and efficient manner. MBSE facilitates the effective representation of the many different artifacts that are required during system development, from requirements elicitation and analysis, design, manufacturing, implementation, validation, and delivery to maintenance and evolution. Moreover, MBSE supports the implementation of many of the activities involved in the development, from individual steps to entire processes and workflows. Compared to traditional (e.g., ’document’-based development), MBSE can thus improve communication and present analysis and automation opportunities that can help ensure that the system satisfies complex, possibly evolving sets of requirements from different stakeholders and make development more efficient and agile overall. MBSE also facilitates leveraging new and emerging data analytics techniques and tools through, e.g., detection of anomalies, monitoring of KPIs, as well as automatic simulation and ’what-if’ analyses. SysML (Systems Modeling Language) is a modeling language that has been specifically designed to support Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE). It provides a standardized and unified approach to modeling system requirements, architecture, behavior, and performance and has become a de facto standard. It is a graphical (and soon textual) language that allows system engineers to represent complex systems and their interactions in a clear, consistent, and structured way. By using SysML, MBSE practitioners can create high-quality models that enable effective system design, analysis, validation, and testing. SysML also facilitates the integration of various engineering disciplines and stakeholders throughout the system development lifecycle. This makes it easier to ensure that the system meets the desired functionality, performance, reliability, and safety requirements. In addition, SysML is an essential tool for MBSE practitioners to effectively represent and manage the diverse artifacts and processes involved in system development, resulting in more effective and efficient system development processes.

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’22 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. Additional material
   • Workshop web page (URL of the draft web page, if one exists)
   • The Overleaf template is available here
   • Draft Call for papers for the Workshop (one page Call for papers that you intend to send out if your workshop is accepted)