2009-10-21

Towards Flexible Model-Driven Engineering

by: Gilles Perrouin

Abstract: Models have been used as abstractions to reason about the "real-world" as soon the humanity tried to understand it. In computer science, to this ability of reasoning about complex software, is added the possibility to actually build it via model transformations since every software artifact can be seen and processed as a model. For more than one decade ago, this Model-Driven Engineering has been put to practice and the number of success stories of applying MDE to build software is quickly increasing, backed by a wide range of both open-source or commercial tool support. However software is intrinsically variable, needs to adapt to an ever changing environment and is required to meet often inconsistent user requirements. Hence flexibility is the keyword to build successful software in such conditions. Yet, this concern has not been appropriately taken into account in current approaches, limiting software adaptability and slowing down the adoption of MDE in all areas for software engineering. In this talk, I will present a few achievements in reconciling flexibility with MDE in Software Product line Engineering, Requirements Engineering, Self-Adaptive Systems Design and Language Engineering.