In this paper, we tackle the problem of guaranteed simulation of cyber-physical systems, an important model for current engineering systems. Their is always increasing complexity which leads to models of higher and higher dimensions, yet typically involving multiple subsystems or even multiple physics. Given this modularity, we more precisely explore cosimulation of such dynamical systems, with the

General ontology is a prominent theoretical foundation for information technology analysis, design, and development. Ontology is a branch of philosophy which studies what exists in reality. A widely used ontology in information systems, especially for conceptual modeling, is the BWW (Bunge–Wand–Weber), which is based on ideas of the philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge, as synthesized by Wand and

Model transformation plays an important role in developing software systems using the model-driven engineering paradigm. Examples of applications of model transformation include forward engineering, reverse engineering of code into models, and refactoring. Poor-quality model transformation code is costly and hard to maintain. There is a need to develop techniques and tools that can support transformation

Our everyday lives are increasingly pervaded by digital assistants and smart devices forming the Internet of Things (IoT). While user interfaces to directly monitor and control individual IoT devices are becoming more sophisticated and end-user friendly, applications to connect standalone IoT devices and create more complex IoT processes for automating and assisting users with repetitive tasks still

Model-driven development platforms shift the focus of software development activity from coding to modeling for enterprises. A significant number of such platforms are available in the market. Selecting the best fitting platform is challenging, as domain experts are not typically model-driven deployment platform experts and have limited time for acquiring the needed knowledge. We model the problem

Business process modelling languages typically enable the representation of business process models by employing (graphical) symbols. These symbols can vary depending upon the verbosity of the language, the modelling paradigm, the focus of the language and so on. To make explicit different constructs and rules employed by a specific language, as well as bridge the gap across different languages, meta-models

Declarative process modelling languages focus on describing a process by restrictions over the behaviour, which must be satisfied throughout the whole process execution. Hence, they are well suited for modelling knowledge-intensive processes with many decision points. However, such models can be hard to read and understand, which affect the modelling and maintenance of the process models tremendously

This paper provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of research work on how uncertainty is currently represented in software models. The survey presents the definitions and current research status of different proposals for addressing uncertainty modeling and introduces a classification framework that allows to compare and classify existing proposals, analyze their current status and identify

Models are often used to represent various types of systems. This is especially true for software systems, where cooperating teams create models using a modeling language (e.g., UML). In cooperative modeling scenarios, it is useful to identify contributions and changes performed by individuals and teams. This paper presents a technique called CHECKSUM, which monitors the cooperative work done on models

Avionics are highly critical systems that require extensive testing to comply with international safety standards. Cockpit display systems (CDS) are a mandatory part of modern cockpits of both manned and unmanned aircraft. The information from various avionics components is displayed on CDS using a variety of flight instruments. An important part of testing avionics systems is to evaluate whether the

We study the relationship between session types and behavioural contracts, representing Communicating Finite State Machines (CFSMs), under the assumption that processes communicate asynchronously. Session types represent a syntax-based approach for the description of communication protocols, while behavioural contracts, formally expressing CFSMs, follow an operational approach. We show the existence

Environmental dynamism is gaining ground as a driving force for enterprise transformation. To address the changes, the capabilities of digital enterprises need to adapt. Capability modeling can facilitate this process of transformation. However, a plethora of approaches for capability modeling exist. This study explores how concepts relevant to change have been implemented in the meta-models of these

We understand this paper as a contribution to the “anatomy” of conceptual models. We propose a signature of conceptual models for their characterization, which allows a clear distinction from other types of models. The motivation for this work arose from the observation that conceptual models are widely discussed in science and practice, especially in computer science, but that their potential is far

Dealing with variability, during Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE), means trying to allow software engineers to develop a set of similar applications based on a manageable range of variable functionalities according to expert users’ needs. Particularly, variability management (VM) is an activity that allows flexibility and a high level of reuse during software development. In the last years

Modeling and simulation for multi-aircraft collision avoidance to understand the mechanistic behavior is an important activity. Building models using general programming language typically requires specialist knowledge, and this limits the spread of modeling and simulation approach among multi-aircraft collision avoidance scenario. Thus, a software environment is needed to support convenient development

Representing a business process as a collaboration of interacting processes has become feasible with the emergence of data-centric business process management paradigms. Usually, these interacting processes have relations and, thereby, form a complex relational process structure. The interactions of processes within this relational process structure need to be coordinated to arrive at a meaningful

Querying large models efficiently often imposes high demands on system resources such as memory, processing time, disk access or network latency. The situation becomes more complicated when data are highly interconnected, e.g. in the form of graph structures, and when data sources are heterogeneous, partly coming from dynamic systems and partly stored in databases. These situations are now common in

Live modeling has been recognized as an important technique to edit behavioral models while being executed and helps in better understanding the impact of a design choice. In the context of model-driven development, models can be executed by interpretation or by the translation of models into existing programming languages, often by code generation. This work is concerned with the support of live modeling

In this paper, we describe DiOS , a lightweight model operating system, which can be used to execute programs that make use of POSIX APIs. Such executions are fully reproducible: running the same program with the same inputs twice will result in two exactly identical instruction traces, even if the program uses threads for parallelism. DiOS is implemented almost entirely in portable C and C++: although

Objective The goal of this study is to identify gaps and challenges related to cross-domain model management focusing on consistency checking. Method We conducted a systematic literature review. We used the keyword-based search on Google Scholar, and we identified 618 potentially relevant studies; after applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, 96 papers were selected for further analysis. Results The

Mutation testing (MT) targets the assessment of test cases by measuring their efficiency to detect faults. This technique involves modifying the program under test to emulate programming faults, and assessing whether the existing test cases detect such mutations. MT has been extensively studied since the 70’s, and many tools have been proposed for widely used languages like C, Java, Fortran, Ada and

The rise of domain-specific (Visual) languages and the inherent complexity of developing graphical editors for these languages have led to the emergence of proposals that provide support for this task. Most of these proposals are principally based on EMF and GMF, which effectively help to simplify and increase the level of automation of the development process of the editors, but it is important to

By bridging the semantic gap, domain-specific language (DSLs) serve an important role in the conquest to allow domain experts to model their systems themselves. In this publication we present a case study of the development of the Continuous REactive SysTems language (CREST), a DSL for hybrid systems modeling. The language focuses on the representation of continuous resource flows such as water, electricity

The QVT-Relations (QVT-R) model transformation language is an OMG standard notation for model transformation specification. It is highly declarative and supports (in principle) bidirectional (bx) transformation specification. However, there are many unclear or unsatisfactory aspects to its semantics, which is not precisely defined in the standard. UML-RSDS is an executable subset of UML and OCL. It

The discipline of enterprise architecture (EA) is an established approach to model and manage the interaction of business processes and IT in an organization. Thereby, the EA model as a central artifact of EA is subject to a continuous evolution caused by multiple sources of changes. The continuous evolution requires a lot of effort in controlling and managing the evolution of the EA model. This is

We propose an epistemic approach to formalizing statistical properties of machine learning. Specifically, we introduce a formal model for supervised learning based on a Kripke model where each possible world corresponds to a possible dataset and modal operators are interpreted as transformation and testing on datasets. Then, we formalize various notions of the classification performance, robustness

Developers change models with clear intentions—e.g., for refactoring, defects removal, or evolution. However, in doing so, developers are often unaware of the consequences of their changes. Changes to one part of a model may affect other parts of the same model and/or even other models, possibly created and maintained by other developers. The consequences are incomplete changes and with it inconsistencies

UML profiles offer an intuitive way for developers to build domain-specific modelling languages by reusing and extending UML concepts. Eclipse Papyrus is a powerful open-source UML modelling tool which supports UML profiling. However, with power comes complexity, implementing non-trivial UML profiles and their supporting editors in Papyrus typically requires the developers to handcraft and maintain

Automated process discovery is a technique that extracts models of executed processes from event logs. Logs typically include information about the activities performed, their timestamps and the resources that were involved in their execution. Recent approaches to process discovery put a special emphasis on (human) resources, aiming at constructing resource-aware process models that contain the inferred

Many database management systems (DBMS) need to ensure atomicity and isolation of transactions for logical data consistency, as well as to guarantee temporal correctness of the executed transactions. Since the mechanisms for atomicity and isolation may lead to breaching temporal correctness, trade-offs between these properties are often required during the DBMS design. To be able to address this concern

Wireless technologies are continuously evolving, including features such as the extension to mid- and long-range communications and the support of an increasing number of devices. However, longer ranges increase the probability of suffering from hidden terminal issues. In the particular case of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), the use of Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms introduced in IEEE 802

Modeling is requiring increasingly larger efforts while becoming indispensable given the complexity of the problems we are solving. Modelers face high cognitive load to understand a multitude of complex abstractions and their relationships. There is an urgent need to better support tool builders to ultimately provide modelers with intelligent modeling assistance that learns from previous modeling experiences

There exists a plethora of claims about the advantages and disadvantages of model transformation languages compared to general-purpose programming languages. With this work, we aim to create an overview over these claims in the literature and systematize evidence thereof. For this purpose, we conducted a systematic literature review by following a systematic process for searching and selecting relevant

Process design artifacts have been increasingly used to guide the modeling of business processes. To support users in designing and understanding process models, different process artifacts have been combined in several ways leading to the emergence of the so-called “hybrid process artifacts”. While many hybrid artifacts have been proposed in the literature, little is known about how they can actually

The existing tools that aim to derive data models from business process models are typically able to process the source models represented by one single notation and also serialized in one specific way. However, the standards (e.g., BPMN) enable different serialization formats and also provide serialization flexibility, which leads to various implementations of the standard in different modeling tools

The increasing complexity of reactive systems can be mitigated with the use of components and composition languages in model-driven engineering. Designing composition languages is a challenge itself as both practical applicability (support for different composition approaches in various application domains), and precise formal semantics (support for verification and code generation) have to be taken

High-tech companies are struggling today with the maintenance of legacy software. Legacy software is vital to many organizations as it contains the important business logic. To facilitate maintenance of legacy software, a comprehensive understanding of the software’s behavior is essential. In terms of component-based software engineering, it is necessary to completely understand the behavior of components

Engineering of modern embedded systems requires complex technical, managerial and operational processes. To cope with the complexity, modeling is a commonly used approach in the embedded software industry. The modeling approaches in embedded software vary since the characteristics of modeling such as purpose, medium type and life cycle phase differ among systems and industrial sectors. The objective

Model checking is an effective way to verify behaviours of an agent-based simulation system. Three behaviours are analysed: operational, control, and global behaviours. Global behaviours of a system emerge from operational behaviours of local components regulated by control behaviours of the system. The previous works principally focus on verifying the system from the operational point of view (operational

Product line engineering (PLE) has been employed to large-scale cyber-physical systems (CPSs) to provide customization based on users’ needs. A PLE methodology can be characterized by its support for capturing and managing the abstractions as commonalities and variabilities and the automation of the configuration process for effective selection and customization of reusable artifacts. The automation

Journalism relies more and more on information and communication technology (ICT). ICT-based journalistic knowledge platforms continuously harvest potentially news-relevant information from the Internet and make it useful for journalists. Because information about the same event is available from different sources and formats vary widely, knowledge graphs are emerging as a preferred technology for

Model-driven development (MDD) tools based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) typically store all elements in a model in a single file which arguably is one of the main reasons why these tools do not scale well and cannot take advantage of existing code versioning systems and other related facilities such as Git and Make. In this work, we describe an approach for storing models in multiple files

Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) was introduced by the Object Management Group as an alternative modeling language, targeting human-centric processes characterized by lack of structure and agility. However, although it is adequately supported by well-known process management tools, CMMN applicability as a modeling language is being questioned in practice. In this work, an empirical evaluation

In rule-based approaches, a model transformation definition tells how an instance of a source metamodel should be transformed to an instance of a target metamodel. As these metamodels undergo changes, model transformations defined over these metamodels may get out of sync. Restoring conformance between model transformations and the metamodels is a complex and error-prone task. In this paper, we propose

Developing safety-critical, software-intensive embedded systems are characterized by the need to identify hazards and to define hazard-mitigating requirements at the earliest possible stage of development, i.e., during requirements engineering. These hazard-mitigating requirements must be adequate in the sense that they must specify the functionality required by the stakeholders in addition to rendering

Model-based software engineering gains further attention these days. To better support it, the use of constraint languages is important in order to bridge expressiveness gaps and eliminate ambiguity. Nevertheless, the use of model-based constraint languages, like the Object Constraint Language (OCL), is quite limited and the specification of constraints is left to the implementation stage. One option

The paper describes a multidisciplinary work that uses a model-based systems engineering method for developing real-time magnetoencephalography (MEG) signal processing. We introduce a requirement-driven, model-based development methodology (RDD and MBD) to provide a high-level environment and efficiently handle the complexity of computation and control systems. The proposed development methodology

Software in modern vehicles consists of multi-criticality functions, where a function can be safety-critical with stringent real-time requirements, less critical from the vehicle operation perspective, but still with real-time requirements, or not critical at all. Next-generation autonomous vehicles will require higher computational power to run multi-criticality functions and such a power can only

Executable domain-specific languages (DSLs) enable the execution of behavioral models. While an execution is mostly driven by the model content (e.g., control structures), many use cases require interacting with the running model, such as simulating scenarios in an automated or interactive way, or coupling the model with other models of the system or environment. The management of these interactions

Data of sequential nature arise in many application domains in the form of, e.g., textual data, DNA sequences, and software execution traces. Different research disciplines have developed methods to learn sequence models from such datasets: (i) In the machine learning field methods such as (hidden) Markov models and recurrent neural networks have been developed and successfully applied to a wide range

Traditionally, the preferred means of documentation used by safety engineers have been sheets- and text-based solutions. However, in the last decades, the introduction of model-driven engineering in conjunction with Component-Based Design has been influencing the way safety engineers perform their tasks; especially in the area of fault analysis, model-driven approaches have been developed aimed at

Business processes are frequently executed within application systems that involve humans, computer systems as well as objects of the Internet of Things (IoT). Nevertheless, the usage of IoT technology for system supported process execution is still constrained by the absence of a common system architecture that manages the communication between both worlds. In this paper, we introduce an integrated

With the extensive development of big data and social networks, the user profile field has received much attention. User profiling is essential for understanding the characteristics of various users, contributing to better understanding of their requirements in specific scenarios. User-generated contents which directly reflect people’s thoughts and intention are a valuable source for profiling users

When engineering complex systems, models are typically used to represent various systems aspects. These models are often heterogeneous in terms of modeling languages, provenance, number or scale. As a result, the information actually relevant to engineers is usually split into different kinds of interrelated models. To be useful in practice, these models need to be properly integrated to provide global

Model-driven engineering involves the construction of models on different levels of abstraction. Software engineers are supported by model transformations, which automate the transition from high- to low-level models. Product line engineering denotes a systematic process that aims at developing different product variants from a set of reusable assets. When model-driven engineering is combined with

Software build systems tackle the problem of building software from sources in a way which is sound (when a build completes successfully, the relations between the generated and source files are as specified) and optimal (only genuinely required rebuilding steps are done). In this paper, we explain and exploit the connection between software build and the megamodel consistency problem. The model-driven

Service composition aims at achieving a business goal by composing existing service-based applications or components. The response time of a service is crucial, especially in time-critical business environments, which is often stated as a clause in service-level agreements between service providers and service users. To meet the guaranteed response time requirement of a composite service, it is important

As the engineering of distributed embedded systems is getting more and more complex, due to increasingly sophisticated functionalities demanding more and more powerful hardware, model-based development of software-intensive embedded systems has become a de facto standard in recent years. Among other advantages, it enables design space exploration methods allowing for frontloading techniques which support

The network functions virtualization (NFV) advent is making way for the rapid deployment of network services (NS) for telecoms. Automation of network service management is one of the main challenges currently faced by the NFV community. Explicitly defining a process for the design, deployment, and management of network services and automating it is therefore highly desirable and beneficial for NFV

Mastering the complexity of safety assurance for modern, software-intensive systems is challenging in several domains, such as automotive, robotics, and avionics. Model-based safety analysis techniques show promising results to handle this challenge by automating the generation of required artifacts for an assurance case. In this work, we adapt prominent approaches and propose to augment of SysML models