Software Modeling and the Future of Engineering
Abstract: In the past fifty years the world of engineering has considerably changed. From computer-assisted to software-intensive, most classical and emerging domain engineering fields now heavily draw on some forms of Software Model Engineering (SME) shortly called “Software Modeling”. Starting from a general map of engineering fields, the talk will first outline this important evolution and the progressive shift of SME from the mere support of code production and maintenance to the much broader spectrum of a central practice in most of these current domain engineering fields. In other words the focus of software modeling is rapidly changing from software engineering to engineering software. But what is exactly SME? Historically its definition has been rather fluctuating. The last iteration, since 2000, did not even produce a unique characterization. On the contrary, SME may be viewed as composed as a set of different facets, some of them not even mutually compatible. The talk will describe these various segments of SME, their objective, market, usage characteristics and hopefully convergence of goals. One of these segments, the management of abstract correspondences between models (and of transformations, their operational counterparts) will be for example more particularly detailed and its importance outlined. All these observations will allow to conclude that, at this point of its history and in this state of maturity, software modeling may be seen as an essential contribution to the future of engineering and an outstanding long-term research opportunity.
Speaker: Jean Bézivin is industry consultant in sofware modeling. Before retiring, he was professor of Computer Science at the University of Nantes. He previously created AtlanMod, a research team common to INRIA and Ecole des Mines de Nantes. He got his Master degree from the University of Grenoble and Ph.D. from the University of Rennes 1. He has been research assistant in 1972 at the Queen’s University of Belfast and in 1973 at the Concordia University of Montreal. Since 1980 he has been very active in Europe in the object-oriented community and in the model-driven community, starting the ECOOP, TOOLS, MoDELS and ICMT series of conferences. He founded in 1979, at the University of Nantes, one of the first Master programs in Software Engineering entirely devoted to Object Technology. He has published many papers and organized tutorials and workshops in the domains of concurrency, simulation, object-oriented programming, and model driven engineering (MDE). On the subjects of MDE and MDA™, he has been leading the OFTA industrial group in France, co-animating a CNRS specific action and the Dagstuhl seminar #04101. He is a member of the ECOOP, TOOLS, MODELS and ICMT steering committees. He was co-chair of the ECOOP’2006 conference organized in Nantes and program chair of TOOLS Europe’2007 held in Zurich in June 2007.