Model-driven Development Principles Research Articles

A survey on the model-centered approaches to conceptual modeling of IoT systems

Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of connected objects, entities, devices, and components which share and transfer data over a network. Many papers are published on the topic of conceptual models in the IoT context, but it is difficult to assess the current status of the conceptual modeling approaches and methods for IoT systems. This paper presents an overview of the state of the art as well as discusses fundamental concepts, challenges and current research gaps with potential future agenda for conceptual modeling of IoT. Search facilities in the selected online repositories were used to identify the most relevant papers. The primary results were scanned and papers were selected according to the inclusion/exclusion criteria. Selected papers were assessed to extract data for the defined attributes. This paper confirms that there is a large body of research related to modeling of IoT systems. However, the results show that there is a lack of commonly agreed approaches and supporting formal methods for conceptual modeling of IoT systems. On the other hand, recent studies that apply model-based or model-driven development principles that use ontology or metamodel based approaches are promising due to systematic use of models as the primary means of a development process enabling for the dissemination of the methods further to the emerging fields such as smart cities, factories, transportation, hospitals, healthcare, hospitality and tourism, etc.

MDA-Based Approach for Blockchain Smart Contract Development

Blockchain smart contracts can support the decentralisation of business processes, but due to smart contracts’ specifics, their development is a complicated process. Introducing model-driven development principles in smart contract development can facilitate requirement specification, design, and implementation activities. This paper presents a model-driven development method MDAsmartCD (Model-Driven Architecture-based Smart Contract Development) to alleviate smart contract development by supporting the complete MDA life cycle, covering the definition of Computation-Independent Model, Platform-Independent Model, and two instances of Platform-Specific Models. In MDAsmartCD, model transformations (model-to-model and model-to-text) are used to produce smart contract code in the Hyperledger Fabric platform Go and the Ethereum platform Solidity programming languages. The method application was demonstrated by implementing the smart contract for the hackathon solution and executing the generated Solidity and Go smart contracts in the workflow of issuing certificates for hackathon participants. During the execution of the workflow, both deployed smart contracts behaved identically and recorded analogous results in respective blockchain data storages. This demonstrated that the MDAsmartCD method enables the generation of compilable and executable smart contract code, ready for deployment on a blockchain platform.

SQAL Self-Adaptive System's Quality Assurance Language

Today's software systems tend to be flexible and dynamic by provisioning mechanisms to react quickly to the environment changes and to adapt system configuration accordingly, in order to maintain the required quality of service (QoS). The engineering of system self-adaptation requires new modeling methods and development methodologies that employ the principles of model-driven development in building self-adaptive systems (SASs). To tackle this issue, the present work proposes SQAL (self-adaptive system quality assurance language) a domain specific language for quality-aware SASs. This language allows describing SASs architectural elements and the corresponding interrelations in terms of hierarchical compositions. It also provides concepts for defining SASs behavioral aspects by identifying adaptation actions and mainly weighting them with QoS parameters. SQAL is defined in terms of its abstract and concrete syntaxes. This article associates a PSMaude-based semantics to SQAL in order to quantitatively analyze quality-aware SASs behaviors.

Interface Automata for Choreographies

Choreographic approaches to message-passing applications can be regarded as an instance of the model-driven development principles. Choreographies specify interactions among distributed participants coordinating among themselves with message-passing at two levels of abstractions. A global view of the application is specified with a model that abstracts away from asynchrony while a local view of the application specifies the communication pattern of each participant. Noteworthy, the latter view can typically be algorithmically obtained by projection of the global view. A crucial element of this approach is to verify the so-called well-formed conditions on global views so that its projections realise a sound communication protocol. We introduce a novel local model, group interface automata, to represent the local view of choreographies and propose a new method to verify the well-formedness of global choreographies. We rely on a recently proposed semantics of global views formalised in terms of pomsets.

Model driven transformation development (MDTD): An approach for developing model to model transformation

Abstract Context In the Model Driven Development (MDD) approach, model transformations are responsible for the semi-automation of software development process converting models between different abstraction levels. The development of model transformations involves a complexity inherent to the transformation domain, in addition to the complexity of software development in general. Therefore, the construction of model transformations requires software engineering feature such as processes and languages to facilitate its development and maintenance. Objective This paper presents a framework to develop unidirectional relational model transformation using the MDD approach itself, which integrates: (i) a software development process suitable for the model transformation domain (ii) a Domain specific language for transformation modeling (iii) a transformation chain, to (semi) automate the proposed process, and (iv) a development environment to support it. Methods The proposal systematizes the development of model transformation, following the MDD principles. An iterative and incremental process guides transformation development from requirement specification to transformation codification. The proposal has been evaluated through a case study and a controlled experiment. Results The framework enables model transformation specification at a high abstraction level and (semi) automatically transforms it into models at a low abstraction level until the transformation code. The results of the case study showed that people with different levels of knowledge of MDD, or without experience in transformation languages, were able to develop transformations through the framework and generated executable code. Conclusions The framework integrates the essential elements involved in the development of model transformation and enables the abstraction of technological details. The results of the case study and controlled experiment showed the feasibility of the proposal and its use in dealing with the complexity involved in model transformation development.

Methodology for the model-driven development of service oriented IoT applications

Abstract The main problem with the current technology solutions for Internet of Things (IoT) is located at the application level, in which there is still a lack of software components, frameworks, and tools which can help end-users to easily develop IoT applications and to manage the things or objects. These requirements lead to the use of the principles of Model-Driven Development (MDD) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for the construction of software applications, allowing the generation of models at different levels of abstraction, with the possibility of generating software implementation artifacts (code) on different platforms, as well as allow the decomposition of complex and monolithic systems into loosely coupled components. In this paper, we propose a methodology based on the MDD for solving the challenges in the IoT system developments. The methodology is composed of four phases with different levels of abstraction, viewpoint, granularity, and service-oriented. Furthermore, a set of MDD methods for the transformation of models using formal rules are proposed. We present a smart vehicle scenario in which the methodology and methods are implemented, allowing the generation of executable code as a component of a real-time system. In addition, an architecture for IoT systems composed of four layers is presented, which is based on the SOA approach. In this way, the methodology and the architecture allow the interoperability (from the perspective of models and software components) between heterogeneous devices to be guaranteed in multiple ways, establishing a bridge between the digital and physical world of the IoT domain .

Teaching pragmatic model-driven software development

Model-driven software development is surrounded by numerous myths and misunderstandings that hamper its adoption. For long, our students were victims of these myths and considered MDSD impractical and only applied in academy. In this paper we discuss these myths and present our experience with devising an MDSD course that challenges them and motivates students to understand MDSD principles. The main contribution of this work is a set of MDSD teaching guidelines that can make the course pragmatic in the eyes of students - programmers. These guidelines introduce MDSD from the viewpoint of a programmer as a pragmatic tool for solving concrete problems in the development process. In our MDSD course we implemented the presented guidelines. The course shows several techniques and principles of model-driven development in multiple incremental iterations instead of concentrating on a single tool. At the same time we unite these techniques by using a dynamic visualisation tool that shows to the students the whole infrastructure in the big picture. The course is implemented as an iterative incremental MDSD case study. The paper concludes with a survey performed with our students that indicates positive results of the approach.

CONCEPT LOCATION MODELING THROUGH BUSINESS PROCESS VIEWS

Concept location is a key activity during software modernization since it allows maintainers to exactly determine what pieces of source code support a specific concept. Real-world business processes and information systems providing operational IT support for respective processes can be misaligned as a consequence of uncontrolled maintenance over time. When concepts supported by an information system are getting outdated or misaligned, concept location becomes a time-consuming and error-prone task. Moreover, enterprise information systems (which implement business processes) embed significant business knowledge over time that is neither present nor documented anywhere else. To support the evolution of existing information systems, the embedded knowledge must first be retrieved and depicted in up-to-date business process models and then be mapped to the source code. This paper addresses this issue through a concept location approach that considers business activities as the key concept to be located and discovers different partial business process views for each piece of source code. Thus, the concept location problem becomes the problem of extracting such views. This approach follows model-driven development principles and an automatic model transformation is implemented to facilitate its adoption. Moreover, a case study involving two real-life information system demonstrates its feasibility.

A model-driven co-simulation environment for heterogeneous systems

Modern heterogeneous systems, due to their complexity and multifaceted nature, require flexible high-level design and simulation techniques that take into account both aspects of continuous time modeling and discrete event modeling. In this context, model-driven approaches and extensions of the OMG Unified Modeling Language for the Real-time Embedded system and System-on-Chip domains are gaining popularity, both in industry as well as in academy, since they offer a high degree of abstraction and provide a common framework for the design, simulation and configuration management. To establish advanced model-driven design environments for complex heterogeneous systems, possible strategies for combining such approaches and languages in a common modeling and simulation framework must be determined. This article proposes a model-driven continuous/discrete co-simulation framework based on the OMG SysML standard—a UML profile for system engineering applications—for discrete event modeling, and on the industry de-facto standard Matlab/Simulink for continuous time modeling. The proposed approach adopts a code-in-the-loop co-simulation schema where optimized C/C++ code—including glue code for time synchronization and model interaction—is automatically generated from Simulink and SysML models according to model-driven development principles. A supporting environment (also described here) provides simulation features such as remote graphical animation and model execution control.

Evolution and change management of XML-based systems

XML is de-facto a standard language for data exchange. Structure of XML documents exchanged among different components of a system (e.g. services in a Service-Oriented Architecture) is usually described with XML schemas. It is a common practice that there is not only one but a whole family of XML schemas each applied in a particular logical execution part of the system. In such systems, the design and later maintenance of the XML schemas is not a simple task.In this paper we aim at a part of this problem – evolution of the family of the XML schemas. A single change in user requirements or surrounding environment of the system may influence more XML schemas in the family. A designer needs to identify the XML schemas affected by a change and ensure that they are evolved coherently with each other to meet the new requirement. Doing this manually is very time consuming and error prone. In this paper we show that much of the manual work can be automated. For this, we introduce a technique based on the principles of Model-Driven Development. A designer is required to make a change only once in a conceptual schema of the problem domain and our technique ensures semi-automatic coherent propagation to all affected XML schemas (and vice versa). We provide a formal model of possible evolution changes and their propagation mechanism. We also evaluate the approach on a real-world evolution scenario.

Agent-oriented software engineering: a model-driven approach

A recent trend in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is the adoption of a model-driven approach for designing Multiagent Systems (MASs). OMG's Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) provides standards useful for a model-driven software engineering process. Bringing MDA and AOSE together, we propose that building interoperable agents for various existing agent methodologies requires the definition of two things: (1) a core metamodel unifying the basic agent-oriented concepts, and (2) its complementing framework supporting the design, development and execution of agent systems in a model-driven manner. This paper presents a step towards the definition of this framework. For this purpose, we take a given Platform-Independent Model for Service-Oriented Architectures (PIM4SOA) and discuss how service models, designed in accordance with the PIM4SOA can be deployed in agent platforms, such as JACK and JADE, using principles of Model-Driven Development (MDD). Additionally, this provides a foundation for incorporating autonomous agents into different architectures, for example, SOA.