ME 2011 - Models and Evolution

ACM/IEEE 14th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems

The ME 2011 workshop is a satellite event at MoDELS 2011 and the continuance of the following events: ME 2011 (at MoDELS), MoDSE-MCCM 2009 (at MoDELS), MCCM 2008 (at MoDELS), MoDSE 2008 (at CSMR), MoDSE 2007 (at CSMR).

With the increasing use of Model-Based Development in many domains (e.g., Automotive Software Engineering, Business Process Engineering), models are starting to become core artifacts of modern software engineering processes.  By raising the level of abstraction and using concepts closer to the problem and application domain rather than the solution and technical domain, models become core assets and reusable intellectual property, being worth the effort of maintaining and evolving them. Therefore, increasingly models experience the same issues as traditional software artifacts, i.e., being subject to many kinds of changes, which range from rapidly evolving platforms to the evolution of the functionalitites provided by the applications developed. These modifications include changes at all levels, from requirements through architecture and design, to executable models, documentation and test suites. They typically affect various kinds of models including data models, behavioral models, domain models, source code models, goal models, etc.  Coping with and managing the changes that accompany the evolution of software assets is therefore an essential aspect of Software Engineering as a discipline.

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is an approach to software design and development in which models are the primary artifacts, and play a key role. In MDE, models represent domain-specific concepts and conform to metamodels, specifically supporting the idea of Domain Specific Languages. Therefore, besides evolution of the level of models themselves, the issues of evolution on the level of the metamodels becomes an increasingly pressing issue. Core tasks of MDE are the manipulation and transformation of models conforming to metamodels, thus providing base technologies to manage software evolution.  Model (co-)evolution and consistency management become crucial activities to cope with the natural changes of applications as well as application domains. As a result, there is an increasing need for more disciplined techniques and engineering tools to support a wide range of model evolution activities, including model differencing, model comparison, model refactoring, model inconsistency management, model versioning and merging, and (co-)evolution of models.