Overview
! ! ! Deadline extension : July 21, 2008 ! ! !
Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is an approach to software design and development in which models are the primary artifacts, and play a key role. The major objective of MDE is to increase productivity and reduce time-to-market by raising the level of abstraction and using concepts closer to the problem domain at hand, rather than those offered by programming languages. Models represent domain-specific concepts and conform to metamodels.
A core task of MDE is the manipulation and transformation of models. Thus, model co-evolution and consistency management become crucial activities to cope with the natural changes of any software system. In fact, 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.
Recently, a number of works devoted to the detection of differences between models has emerged to foster enhanced model management practices. The exploitation of differences is an appropriate solution for version management, because in general the complete system model is far larger than the modifications that occur from one version to another. Apart from these works, further research is required to address the rest of the model evolution activities (refactoring, inconsistency management, versioning, etc.). Moreover, the different dimensions of evolution make the problem intrinsically difficult because modifications can reflect coherent adaptations of correlated artifacts at several layers of the metamodeling architecture. For example, some well-formed rules can be invalidated when a metamodel evolves. The same happens with the associated model transformations. Furthermore, model adaptations should be propagated to artifacts interconnected by means of model transformations. Finally, evolution of model transformations should be reflected in both source and target models.
In addition, there is a substantial difference between the modeling of evolution and the evolution of models. There are plenty of works on the former topic, while our workshop focuses on the evolution of models. One of the goals and expected outcomes of this workshop is to explain and clarify the difference between these two notions, by explicitly identifying the concepts and mechanisms involved in each one.
The main objective of this workshop is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners who work on innovative solutions to deal with model co-evolution and consistency management.