23Rd Workshop on Model Driven Engineering, Verification and Validation (MoDeVVa 2026)

MoDeVVa will take place on Monday, October 5th, 2026 co-located with MODELS 2026 in Malaga, Spain

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Levi Lúcio (Airbus Defense and Space, Germany)

The Liquid-to-Solid Transition: From MBSE to Digital Engineering at Airbus Defence and Space

Abstract: Model-Based Systems Engineering has been in practice at Airbus Defence and Space for a decade, scaling over that time to increasingly large systems and a growing number of programmes. In this talk I focus on three operational assumptions behind MBSE that did not hold in my practice. The first is that a suitable digital backbone — one that keeps data representations fresh, synchronized and usable for collaboration — is already available. In the environments I have worked in, it was largely missing. The second is that data representations and the tool landscape can be settled early in a programme. In practice, both must undergo several phases of coalescence — what I call the liquid-to-solid transition. The third is that tool customization remains a light supporting activity. Instead, the customizations, extensions and new features needed to give systems engineers a day-to-day working environment become a large software engineering product in their own right, with a lifecycle of its own spanning that of the aircraft programme.

Responding to these constraints forced us to rethink and add many dynamic aspects to MBSE, leading to what we — and others in the industry — now call Digital Engineering. Digital Engineering is concerned with how data and models flow and change through an engineering system made of both tools and people. Its goal is that evolving the design and manufacturing of an aircraft becomes a seamless activity for engineers, management and the shop floor alike. This brings a set of activities into the foreground: continuous tool maintenance and integration across many environments; the UX of those tools and how they support engineering methods; when and how new features reach the community; monitoring, scalability and migrations; and supporting and guiding the community while shielding them from tooling concerns that would distract them from building the aircraft. One of these activities, monitoring, has grown into a complete verification and validation framework. Entire collaborations now use it as a cornerstone to track programme KPIs and to drive fast improvement cycles of the design and manufacturing data model.

Within the limits of what can be disclosed, I will present examples from practice where things originally failed and the operational solutions we found, which are now being brought in an agile manner into new aircraft programmes at Airbus DS. I will close with the questions this raises for verification and validation research: what does verifying a model mean while the model is still liquid, and how does V&V effort evolve over a programme's lifetime?

Bio:  Dr. Levi Lúcio started his career as a software engineer at CERN in Switzerland, developing data acquisition software for the LHC particle collider. Drawn to the fundamentals of software engineering, he pursued a PhD in model-based testing at the University of Geneva, which he completed in 2009. During this period he fell into the world of formal methods, which became central to his academic research over the following years. Several research lines emerged from this work, the most impactful of which concerns model transformation languages and their verification. A paper arising from this work recently received the 10-year Most Influential Paper Award from the Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM) journal.

Since 2019 he has worked at Airbus Defence and Space, first as product owner of a simulation framework and more recently as founder of the Digital Engineering Toolkit (DE-Toolkit). As its architect and product owner, he has built and leads the team developing a platform that supports hundreds of engineers in collaborative model-based systems engineering. The DE-Toolkit was instrumental in the successful completion of a large multinational drone programme’s Critical Design Review. Its application has expanded to new programmes, driving teams to introduce more agile ways of working into industrial MBSE.

Alongside his industrial responsibilities, he continues research in formal methods, symbolic execution and simulation. His work sits at the point where model-driven engineering research meets industrial practice at scale — and where research questions are tested against the demands of real engineering programmes.

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.

For the 2026 edition of the MoDeVVa workshop we would like to encourage papers addressing the use of AI techniques such as machine learning, to help address the challenges of model-based V&V, Process Engineering and Quality Assurance, while continuing to welcome work in all areas in the intersection between MDE and V&V.

Special ISSUE

We are pleased to announce that the best papers from MoDeVVa and the SAM Conference will be invited to submit extended versions jointly published in a special issue of Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering: a NASA Journal (ISSE) published by Springer Nature !!

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 in MDE 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 overarching objective of the MoDeVVa workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners in the domain of V&V and MBSE/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:

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

• How can MDE be leveraged to facilitate V&V tasks? 

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

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

• How can MDE be leveraged to facilitate industry to acquire certification for their systems or qualification of their development processes and tools?

• How to deploy V&V in ``lightweight'' modeling environments that do not use explicit metamodeling or heavy modeling infrastructures? 

• How MDE and V&V help in increasing confidence in modern systems involving more and more AI components?

Topics of Interest

We welcome contributions in all areas at the intersection of MBSE/MDE and V&V. Papers addressing the following topics are particularly welcome:

V&V in MBSE/MDE

• Theoretical frameworks and approaches for integration of V&V in MBSE/MDE.

•  Formalisms and theories for the specification and verification of models.

• Formal approaches to models, modeling languages, including DSMLs and MDE in general.

• Modeling relations for checking model conformance and/or refinement.

• The application and combination of different  V&V techniques (e.g., classical testing, static analysis, model checking, deductive approaches, runtime verification) to MBSE/MDE artifacts.

• V&V in ''lightweight'' modeling environments that do not use explicit metamodeling or heavy modeling infrastructures

MDE in V&V, Certification, and Quality Assurance

• Use of MDE abstractions (models, metamodels, model transformations) in V&V tasks. 

• Use of model-evolution approaches to enable incremental V&V.

• Industrial case studies for application of MDE for quality assurance.

• Model-based process engineering to acquire certification.

• Process engineering to support V&V activities.

Tools, usability, and applications

• Integration between modeling tools, IDEs and V&V back-ends.

• Innovative approaches for model-based V&V of ''real-world'' systems.

• Tools and techniques that help reduce the semantic gap between models and back-end formalisms used in V&V tasks.

• Case studies and applications of V&V in MBSE/MDE.

• Application of MDE+V&V to different domains such as cyberphysical systems, distributed, real-time, embedded systems, stochastic systems, IoT, digital twins, AI and machine learning models, etc.

• Integration of MDE+V&V with different types of analysis such as sensitivity analysis, test-case generation, run-time verification, validity frames, simulation, etc.

Organizers

• Saad Bin Abid (Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), United Kingdom)

• Juergen Dingel (Queen's University, Canada)

• Rakshit Mittal (University of Antwerp - Flanders Make, Belgium)

• Iulian Ober (ISAE-SUPAERO, Université de Toulouse, France)

• Ernesto Posse (Lumenix/Zeligsoft, Canada)

Contact: modevva@gmail.com