MoDeVVa will take place Tuesday 20th October 9:00am-12:30pm EDT (Montreal) (UTC -4)

Models are purposeful abstractions of systems and their environments. They can be used to understand, simulate, and validate complex systems at different abstraction levels. Thus, the use of models is of increasing importance for industrial applications. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a development methodology that is based on models, metamodels, and model transformations. The shift from code-centric software development to model-centric software development in MDE opens up promising opportunities for the verification and validation (V&V) of software. On the other hand, the growing complexity of models and model transformations requires efficient V&V techniques in the context of MDE.

The workshop on Model Driven Engineering, Verification and Validation (MoDeVVa) offers a forum for researchers and practitioners who are working on V&V and MDE. The main goals of the workshop are to identify, investigate, and discuss mutual impacts of MDE and V&V.

Scope

Modelling is a powerful technique for handling the complexity of software and hardware artifacts, and their respective environments. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) provides efficient tools for building and working with models, from the requirements specification of a system to code-generation, testing, configuration and deployment. Through the systematic use of digital models, which can be processed automatically by programs, MDE offers the opportunity to verify and  validate every step in the life cycle of a system. Thus, the first motivation for MoDeVVa is the integration of verification and validation (V&V) techniques into MDE.

While V&V can be seen as an enabler in MDE, it presents a set of challenges of its own. These challenges includes issues of usability and integration with MDE processes as well as the technical difficulties of performing V&V tasks.

One way of addressing these challenges is by taking ad-vantage of MDE itself in V&V tasks, for example by means of domain-specific modelling languages (DSMLs) to capture requirements, system properties, specifications and system de-sign, and leveraging all MDE has to offer such as abstraction, refinement, model-transformations and other techniques, to help perform V&V tasks. Thus, the second motivation for MoDeVVa is the integration of MDE techniques into V&V.

Another way of addressing the challenges posed by V&V inMDE is to leverage novel techniques from AI. The advent of practical machine learning techniques and frameworks opens the way for novel approaches to model-based V&V, which are poised to improve the usability and range of V&V. Thus, the third motivation for MoDeVVa is the integration of novel approaches to the challenges presented by V&V and MDE.

Both MDE and V&V intend to help solve “real-world”problems. Real-world problems and systems are complex.Both MDE and V&V propose approaches to tackle such complexity. Thus, the fourth  motivation for MoDeVVa is the applicability of MDE and V&V to complex, real-world problems.

Objectives

The overall objective of the MoDeVVa workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners in the domain of V&V and MDE so that the key issues in the integration of MDE and V&V can be identified and solved.

More concretely, MoDeVVa’s main objectives are to address the following questions:

1) How can V&V tools and techniques be integrated intoMDE in such a way that expertise in V&V is not required in order to obtain the benefits that V&V offers?

2) How can MDE be leveraged to facilitate V&V tasks?

3) How can novel approaches such as Machine-Learning be leveraged to facilitate V&V in MDE?

4) How can the combination of MDE and V&V help to address the development of complex real-world systems?

Topics of Interest

We welcome contributions in all areas at the intersection ofMDE and V&V. This year we would like to encourage papers related to the application of AI techniques such as Machine Learning in V&V and MDE.

V&V in MDE