WorkshopsMODELS 2024

About

Following the tradition of previous conferences, MODELS 2024 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 ACM 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 ACM 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 models24workshops@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’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)

[W1] 1st International Workshop on Sustainability and Modeling (SusMod)

Organizers: Istvan David, Dominik Bork and Judith Michael

Sustainability is becoming a key characteristic of modern systems. While this trend has been long recognized, rigorous formal methods for assessing sustainability, reasoning about often contradicting sustainability properties, and involving the human in this process are missing. SusMod, the International Workshop on Sustainability and Modeling, aims to unearth visceral links between sustainability and MDE, and that, in both directions: MDE in support of sustainable systems engineering, and sustainability of MDE techniques.

[W2] 6th Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Model-driven Engineering (MDE Intelligence)

Organizers: Lola Burgueño, Dominik Bork, Jordi Cabot, Sebastien Gerard and Aurora Ramirez

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become part of everyone’s life. It is used by companies to exploit the information they collect to improve the products and/or services they offer and, wanted or unwanted, it is present in almost every device around us. Lately, AI is also impacting all aspects of the system and software development lifecycle. There is no doubt that MDE has been a means to tame until now part of this complexity. However, its adoption by industry still relies on their capacity to manage the underlying methodological changes including among other things the adoption of new tools. To go one step further, 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 model-based system and software systems engineers will have to design tomorrow.

This workshop provides a forum to discuss, study and explore the opportunities and challenges raised by the integration of AI and MDE. It aims to feature topics such as how to choose, evaluate and adapt AI techniques to MDE as a way to improve current system and software modeling and generation processes in order to increase the benefits and reduce the costs of adopting MDE. We believe that AI artifacts will empower the MDE tools and boost hence the advantages, and then adoption, of MDE at industry level. At the same time, AI is software (and complex software, in fact), we also believe that such AI-powered MDE approach will also benefit the design of AI artifacts themselves and specially to face the challenge of designing “trustable” AI software. Lastly, we also believe that any kind of technique that provides human cognitive capabilities and helps creating “intelligent” software are also in the scope of this workshop. An example would be the knowledge representation techniques and ontologies that can be useful on its own or support other kinds of AI techniques.

[W3] International Workshop on Collaborative and Participatory Modeling (CoPaMo)

Organizers: Istvan David, Anne Gutschmidt and Luciano Marchezan

Collaborative modeling is an important enabler to engineering complex systems. While mostly focusing on the technical and technological aspects of collaboration, the MDE community has also recognized the need for more pronounced stakeholder-facing concerns in collaborative modeling techniques and tools. Such stakeholder-facing concerns are the ones researched under the broader participatory modeling umbrella. This workshop aims to showcase the latest developments in collaborative and participatory modeling, as well as to expose the synergies between collaborative and participatory modeling by inviting researchers and organizers from both communities.

[W4] Workshop on Modeling in Automotive System and Software Engineering (MASE’24)

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

Modelling and model-based approaches to system and software development already have a long tradition in the automotive industry due to, e.g., the high need for abstraction, standardisation and interoperability. It is reasonable to believe that advances in modelling will be key to further advancing automotive system and software engineering as well. A central objective of the workshop is to provide a forum for practitioners and  researchers from industry and academia in which novel, innovative, model-based solutions to current and future challenges in automotive system and software development can be presented and discussed.

Another important objective is the identification of new research problems arising from current trends. MASE’24 encourages submissions presenting novel and insightful descriptions of applications of modelling techniques to problems arising in the context of automotive system and software engineering. Moreover, we welcome experience reports describing insightful uses of modelling, and position papers on future challenges and open problems in the area. All submissions are expected argue the relevance of the described work to automotive software engineering clearly and convincingly.

[W5] 3rd International Workshop on Foundations and Practice of Visual Modeling

Organizers: Francesco Basciani, Amleto Di Salle, Riccardo Rubei and Juha-Pekka Tolvanen

The sheer complexity of software systems nowadays makes modeling artifacts pervasive throughout development, be it use requirements, analysis, design, or development. Whether models are used for communication or prescriptive purposes, their syntax and pragmatics affect usability and represent contributory factors concerning accidental complexity. The diversity of modeling notations and approaches permits classifying them according to different taxonomies. General-purpose and domain-specific modeling languages can be created with different intended scopes. However, all of them can use graphical, textual, maps, matrices, tables, and combinations regarding their concrete syntax. These representations have the undoubted advantage of capturing and increasing understanding of complex software systems and better grasping their rationale. In essence, a visual modeling language creates a joint base for the modeler by improving communication and laying a solid foundation for the implementation. FPVM 2024 aims to promote and foster discussions on visual modeling languages, including novel and visionary ideas and techniques, notations for the generations of support tools for visual languages, and the usability of tools and meta-tools.

[W6] 11th International Workshop on Multi-Level Modeling (MULTI 2024)

Organizers: Gergely Mezei, Claudenir M. Fonseca and Fernando Macías

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, analyse different approaches to multi-level modelling and define objective ways to evaluate their respective strengths and weaknesses.

[W7] Workshop on Low-Code Development Platforms (LowCode)

Organizers: Davide Di Ruscio, Antonio Garmendia, Dimitris Kolovos and Massimo Tisi

Cloud-based low-code development platforms such as Google’s AppSheet, 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 2024 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.

[W8] Workshop on Multi-Paradigm Modelling for Cyber-Physical Systems (MPM4CPS)

Organizers: Moussa Amrani, Randy Paredis, Joeri Exelmans 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.

This year, the Workshop will be organised as a highly interactive session making large room for exchange and discussions, based on out-of-the-box presentations targeting one of the central notions at the heat of MPM4CPS: what makes formalisms, views, abstraction levels, etc. the most appropriate for a given context, task(s), and stakeholders? The morning will invite a keynote speaker, as well as a few, high-quality scientific contributions; the afternoon will be organised as small group discussions around targeted topics on this year’s theme. We welcome anyone interested in joining, or contributing, to these discussions and topics to actively attend.

[W9] First International Workshop on Model Management (MoM)

Organizers: Dominique Blouin, Sylvain Guerin, Vasco Amaral, Anish Bhobe, Chahrazed Boudjemila and João Almeida

Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is a popular way to specify, design, implement, deploy and maintain complex systems with high quality and lower costs. These systems combine multiple areas of engineering, including mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, biochemical, control, signal processing, and more. To represent all these aspects, a large number of heterogeneous models are required. However, managing these models correctly can be challenging, especially when different teams work on them simultaneously, which is common in collaborative and concurrent engineering. This activity is called Model Management (MoM) and includes activities beyond maintaining model consistency, such as managing model views, model validity, model versions, and development workflows.

MoM is crucial for industries that are moving from traditional engineering methods to MBSE. Therefore, there are many approaches to MoM, both from academia and industry. However, there is still no single theory or approach to tackle this problem. To address this, this MoM workshop’s first edition aims to bring together international researchers and practitioners from academia and research for an intense one-day workshop. The goal is to further the state-of-the-art in MoM, develop new collaborations, and define future directions. 

[W10] Workshop on Models and Evolution (ME) 2024

Organizers: Djamel Eddine Khelladi, Juri Di Rocco and Dalila Tamzalit

Model artifacts are subject to constant evolution throughout the life cycle of modern systems.

These dynamics necessitate proper theories, techniques and tools to ensure correctness, consistency, and high quality across the trajectory of evolution.  However, evolution issues are critical, complex and costly to manage, and even more concerned by constant increase in complexity. They concern requirements, software architecture, design, source code, documentation, integration or deployment. They also typically affect various kinds of models (data, behavioural, domain, source code or goal models).

The Models and Evolution workshop will be in its 18th edition in 2024 and aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the latest developments around the topic of evolution of models and various artefacts used in MDE. 

[W11] Workshop on Model Driven Engineering, Verification and Validation (MoDeVVa)

Organizers: Saad Bin Abid, Jens Kosiol, Rakshit Mittal, Iulian Ober and Ernesto Posse

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) or who are applying model-based techniques in V&V activities. The main goals of the workshop are to discuss the state of practice in V&V approaches in MBSE/MDE, of applying MBSE/MDE to V&V and to identify, investigate and discuss emerging research in the mutual impacts of model-based engineering and V&V, as well as to explore tools, integration and applications of V&V in MBSE/MDE and vice-versa.

[W12] Workshop on Modeling Language Engineering (MLE)

Organizers: Ed Seidewitz, Antonio Bucchiarone and Dorian Leroy

Software-intensive systems are complicated, driven by the need to integrate across multiple concerns. Consequently, the development of such systems requires the integration of different concerns and skills. These concerns can be covered by different domain-specific modeling languages, with specific concepts, technologies, and abstraction levels. This multiplication of languages eases the development related to each individual specific concern but raises language and technology integration problems at the different stages of the software life cycle. To reason about the global system as a whole, it is necessary to explicitly describe the different kinds of relationships that exist between the different languages used in its development. To support effective language integration, there is a pressing need to reify and classify these relationships, as well as the language interactions that the relationships enable. Equally, the proliferation of domain-specific modeling languages required increases the need for effective and efficient techniques for engineering languages and their support infrastructures (transformations, analysis tools, editors, execution infrastructure, debuggers, …). The Modeling Language Engineering (MLE) workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners working on modeling-language and software-language engineering. It is a meeting opportunity for Software Language Engineering (SLE) enthusiasts within the software-modeling community.

[W13] 2nd Working Session on a Common Architecture/Infrastructure for Modelling Tools for Teaching

Organizers: Jörg Kienzle and Steffen Zschaler

Many academic modelling tools have accumulated significant technical debt and lack of the nowadays quality standards. Following on from the success of the 1st working session on a common architecture/infrastructure for modelling tools for teaching, held at MODELS’23, which produced a comprehensive catalogue of requirements for modelling tools for teaching to be published in SoSyM, we propose a 2nd working session to focus on designs and implementations delivering on these requirements. The session will have a short programme of presentations, but will prioritise discussion and consensus-forming to work towards community-owned assets as the foundations for modelling tools for teaching.