Guest editorial to the special issue on Success Stories in Model Driven Engineering

摘要

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a software engineering discipline which promotes a new way to develop and maintain software systems by using models as the primary artifacts of the engineering process. The relevance of such a discipline is evidenced by the increasing interest in many scientific endeavors, active technology projects (e.g., the Eclipse Modeling Project) and numerous industrial projects ranging from direct applications of MDE concepts and tools, to those developing its foundations. Historically model transformations and code generation from abstract models have been among the most prominent MDE applications. Nevertheless, they represent only a partial coverage of the MDE application potential: recent advances in MDE have shown how model differencing techniques, model management, megamodeling and interoperability are equally relevant to leverage the discipline of MDE while gaining acceptance, or becoming a mainstream industry practice. While anecdotal descriptions of MDE case studies, as well as new developments in tools, theories and technology appear throughout the literature, success stories of MDE application infrequently appear. This may be due to the many open and unresolved research issues in MDE (e.g., how to deal with very large models, designing model management tool chains), despite the relative maturity achieved by a number of tools-particularly those for model transformation. Many researchers tend to focus on investigating conceptual if not theoretical aspects of MDE, deprecating the relevance of the assessment of the overall discipline in terms of its application to real scale and complexity scenarios. While such robust theoretical contributions are of substantial importance, applications emerging from the most disparate domains may reveal new directions for development of the theory as well as lessons of transferable value for future MDE practice.