MoDeVVa 2019 Call for Papers

MoDeVVa 2019

Co-located with MODELS 2019

16th Workshop on Model Driven Engineering, Verification and Validation

Munich, Germany

September 17th 2019

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, meta-models, and model transformations. The shift from code-centric software development to model-centric software development in MDE opens 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.

Topics of MoDeVVa

The objective of MoDeVVa is to offer a forum for researchers and practitioners who are working on V&V and/or MDE. The major questions of interest in MoDeVVa revolve around the possible overlaps and mutual benefits of MDE and V&V: How can MDE improve V&V? How can V&V increase the reliability of MDE? These questions span a wide range of topics, all of which are relevant to MoDeVVa. Such topics include: the specification of properties for different MDE artifacts (e.g., models, metamodels, model trans- formations, product lines); V&V techniques for different MDE artifacts; analyzing the impact of changes in MDE artifacts on V&V and the need for incremental V&V; enhancing MDE artifacts (e.g., models and metamodels) to better support V&V; the adoption of MDE and V&V in industrial contexts; the use of trans- formations to automate the MDE process (from requirements specification to source code generation); and analyzing and verifying transformations to certify the automation of the MDE process.

We especially invite papers that investigate one of 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 to increase usability of formal techniques as a means to leverage its application to real-world

      • problems?

    • How do different V&V approaches compare with each other? For instance, how do other techniques compare with testing?

    • How can V&V steps be fully automated? Steps of interest span those that have been traditionally conducted in a purely manual manner (e.g., model and code review), to those that have been semi- automated or require some level of user intervention (e.g., test case generation, back annotation of formal verification results, and verifying model transformation properties).

      • Papers addressing the following issues are particularly welcome:

    • Usability of V&V methods applied to MDE.

    • Usability of MDE in V&V tasks.

    • Tools and techniques that help making use of V&V easier and more applicable to “real-world” prob- lems.

    • Tools and techniques that help reduce the semantic gap between V&V formalisms and MDE lan- guages.

    • Approaches to hide V&V formalisms from MDE users (formal methods "under the hood").

    • Reducing the gap between V&V techniques and MDE.

    • Integration between modeling IDEs and formal verification backends.

    • V&V techniques that are invisible for the end-users who are not familiar with formal techniques (hidden models).

    • Using models to increase the practicality of formal verification.

Other topics of interest in the broader areas at the intersection of MDE and V&V are welcome as well:

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

    • Integrating V&V approaches into MDE.

    • Defining V&V approaches that rely on MDE.

    • Modeling conformance relations for checking model refinement.

    • Modeling transformations and models used to support V&V.

    • Analysis of models and model transformations; V&V of models, meta-models, and model transfor- mations.

    • Application of the above topics to “real-world” case studies.

Submissions and Publication

Submitted papers can be either short papers (up to 5 pages) or long papers (up to 10 pages), references included, in IEEE format.

Short papers are aimed at discussing innovative ideas while long papers are aimed at presenting more mature and evaluated research. All accepted papers will be published in the IEEEXplore workshop proceedings, which is indexed by DBLP.

Papers should be submitted via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=modevva2019.

Workshop Format

MoDeVVa 2019 will include an opening keynote, paper presentations and the last session of the day will be dedicated to discussions on the topics presented with the goal of identifying common themes, interesting problems and shared interests and hopefully propose avenues for future research.

We anticipate an enjoyable and exciting event where all participants will leave with answers or well- founded doubts on MDE and V&V.

Important Dates

  • Abstract Submission: July 5th, 2019 (extended)

  • Full Paper Submission: July 11th (extended)

  • Notification to authors: July 29th

  • Final version: August 5th

  • Workshop: September 17th

Organizing Committee email

  • Raquel A. Oliveira (University of Toulouse, France)

  • Ernesto Posse (Zeligsoft, Canada)

  • Iulian Ober (University of Toulouse, France)

  • Saad Bin Abid (Fortiss, Germany)