Editorial to the theme issue on model-driven service engineering

Abstract

During the last years, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) has started to have a direct influence in other research fields. Under the light of the premise that everything is a model, coined by Jean Bezivin in 2004 and adopted by the MDE community since then, practitioners from other areas have discovered that they were able to express their problems in terms of models and then take advantage of MDE techniques to solve them—or at least simplify them, either by increasing the level of automation or by raising the abstraction level at which solutions are planned and developed. The scope varies widely, from generic domains, likeWeb Engineering (see the previous SoSyM Theme Issue on Model-Driven Web Engineering), to more specific ones, like DB schema matching or domotics. Out of doubt, one of the areas that has more decisively benefited from MDE advances has been Service Engineering. It aims at bringing together the benefits of Service Orientation and Business Process Management, therefore making the most of Service Orientation to help organizations deliver sustainable business value with increased agility and cost effectiveness. To that end, services are widely used as software systems, and the focus is shifted to business process as