31st EUROMICRO Conference - Special session: Model Driven Engineering (MDE)

31th EUROMICRO CONFERENCE - Special session: Model Driven Engineering (MDE)

• General Information
  This special session is an integral part of the EUROMICRO 2005 conference. The conference proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society.

• Further Information
  See EUROMICRO conference page.

• Model driven engineering - or model based development as it is often called in traditional engineering disciplines - is an approach that promises to accelerate development, to improve systems quality, to reduce costs, and also to enable reuse. However, while the use of models and related computer aided engineering tools is very common in established engineering disciplines, MDE approaches are still rarely used in industry for the development of embedded systems. This is despite the realization that higher levels of abstraction are required to describe and analyze systems, large problems in systems integration, and despite numerous efforts in developing modeling languages, methods and tools. These deficiencies along with industrial needs have stimulated many research efforts to overcome the current situation.

• Problems facing researchers and developers include the fact that the area of embedded systems is very large. It does not only cover many application domains and different requirements, but is also strongly characterized by multidisciplinarity, where each discipline has its own traditions, concepts, modeling languages and tools. Embedded systems are characterized by a multitude of relations and interactions between its constituent units and with the environment. Moreover, products including embedded systems typically have to be not only cost-efficient, but also dependable and flexible.

• These facts to some extent explain the multitude of efforts in different directions, and the incompatibility between different modeling languages and tools. Other problems may be due to the nature of software, allowing unprecedented design flexibility and constituting an intermediate design representation that can be implemented in a variety of ways. Today, model based development is mainly used for developing subsystems and with little consideration or treatment of cross-cutting aspects such as dependability, real-time performance, and flexibility. On the other hand, taking a more optimistic view, learning from experiences made in more mature disciplines, and taking the strong industrial needs into account, there is plenty of room for innovative research efforts!

• This session aims to gather researchers and engineers from different domains and disciplines, industry and academia, all focusing on different aspects of MDE, in order to stimulate cross- fertilization and thus further the development of successful model based development approaches for embedded systems.