A survey of Model-Driven approaches applied to DEVS - a comparative study of metamodels and transformations

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a subset of Software Engineering (SE) which focuses on models. MDE provides techniques and guidelines to create models (metamodeling) and to transform them onto other models (including code). Recently, several MDE approaches have been successfully applied to the world of Modeling and Simulation (M&S), of which DEVS (Discrete EVent system Specification) is one of the most popular formalisms. The goal of those approaches is to increase DEVS interoperability. Many of them resort to a metamodel to describe DEVS concepts. The most recent ones also provide automatic code generation “Model-To-Text” (M2T) towards DEVS simulators (DEVS “internal” interoperability) and establish links between DEVS and other formalisms, thanks to Model-To-Model (M2M) transformations (DEVS “external” interoperability). The purpose of this paper is to give a state of the art of the MDE contributions to DEVS formalism and to provide a comparative study of the most recent ones.