Invited Talk: Promises and Challenges of Model-Driven Engineering

The complexity of (software-intensive) systems we build as well as the demands that are put on quality, safety, and maintainability of these systems has grown drastically over the last decades. To tackle this complexity, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) treats models, in various formalisms, as first-class artifacts. Such models may be obtained by reverse-engineering of existing software artifacts, for the purpose of analysis, optimization, and evolution. Increasingly, however, software is no longer the primary artifact but rather synthesized from more abstract models. In an attempt to minimize "accidental complexity", the most appropriate modeling languages or formalisms are used for each specific (sub-)problem and phase in the development process. Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) in particular tries to bridge the gap between the problem domain and the technical solution domain. This has led to a proliferation of the number of (software) modeling languages. Software artifacts, models, but also modeling languages, may and will evolve. This has important repercussions on related artifacts such as instance models and transformations. If MDE and DSM are to be usable at an industrial scale, modeling language evolution has to be dealt with, ideally by (semi-)automatically co-evolving artifacts. This talk introduces MDE concepts and techniques as well as the challenges these introduce. Particular attention is be paid to modeling language engineering and language evolution.