Model Driven Engineering 

Schedule

Week

Date

Time

Type

Room

Subject
1 Friday 30 September 13:45 -- 15:45 Theory M.G.016 Domain-Specific Modelling: the need for Modelling Language Engineering;
Modelling Languages: Meta-Modelling
1 Friday 30 September 16:00 -- 18:00 Lab Session M.G.027 metaDepth: Metamodelling and Operational Semantics -- assignment 1
2 Friday 7 October 13:45 -- 15:45 Theory M.G.016 Paper discussion: "Matters of Metamodelling"
2 Friday 7 October 16:00 -- 18:00 Lab Session M.G.027 Work on assignment 1
3 Friday 14 October 13:00 Deadline Assignment 1: metaDepth (metamodelling + operational semantics)
3 Friday 14 October 13:45 -- 15:45 Theory M.G.016 Modelling Languages: Concrete (Visual) Syntax
3 Friday 14 October 16:00 -- 18:00 Lab Session M.G.027 AToMPM: Metamodelling and Concrete (Visual) Syntax -- assignment 2
4 Friday 21 October 13:45 -- 15:45 Theory M.G.016 Paper discussions: Concrete Visual Syntax;
The Meaning of Semantics
4 Friday 21 October 16:00 -- 18:00 Lab Session M.G.027 Work on assignment 2
5 Friday 28 October 13:00 Deadline Assignment 2: AToMPM (metamodelling and concrete syntax)
5 Friday 28 October 13:45 -- 15:45 Theory M.G.016 The many uses of Model Transformation
5 Friday 28 October 16:00 -- 18:00 Lab Session M.G.027 AToMPM: rule-based transformation for Operational Semantics -- assignment 3
6 Thursday 3 November 12:00 -- 16:00 Evaluation M.G.330 Assignments 1 and 2
6 Friday 4 November 13:45 -- 15:45 Theory M.G.016 Specifying and Implementing Model Transformations: RAMification and matching algorithm
6 Friday 4 November 16:00 -- 18:00 Lab Session M.G.027 Work on assignment 3;
AToMPM: rule-based transformation for Denotational Semantics -- assignment 4
7 Friday 11 November 13:00 Deadline Assignment 3: AToMPM (operational semantics)
7 Friday 11 November 13:45 -- 15:45 Theory M.G.016 No class
7 Friday 11 November 16:00 -- 18:00 Lab Session M.G.027 No class
8 Friday 18 November 13:45 -- 15:00 Theory M.G.016 Specifying and Implementing Model Transformations
8 Friday 18 November 15:00 -- 15:45 Project M.G.016 Overview of micro theory exam material
Presentation of project topics
8 Friday 18 November 16:00 -- 18:00 Lab Session M.G.027 Work on assignment 4;
Code Synthesis (model to text transformation) with EGL -- assignment 5
9 Friday 25 November 13:00 Deadline Assignment 4: AToMPM (denotational semantics)
9 Friday 25 November 13:00 Deadline Choosing Project topic (notify Simon Van Mierlo by e-mail)
9 Friday 25 November 13:45 -- 15:45 Theory M.G.016 Putting it all together (with processes): the FTG+PM
9 Friday 25 November 16:00 -- 18:00 Lab Session M.G.027 Work on assignment 5
10 Friday 2 December 13:45 -- 15:00 Evaluation M.G.116 Micro theory exam
10 Friday 2 December 15:00 -- 18:00 Project M.G.116/M.G.330/M.G.317 Individual meetings about project
11 Monday 5 December 13:00 Deadline Assignment 5: Code Generation
11 Thursday 8 December 12:30 -- 17:00 Evaluation M.G.330 Assignments 3, 4, and 5
11 Friday 9 December 13:45 -- 15:45 Project M.G.116/M.G.330/M.G.317 Individual meetings about project
11 Friday 9 December 16:00 -- 18:00 Project M.G.116/M.G.330/M.G.317 Individual meetings about project
12 Thursday 15 December 10:00 Deadline Reading report and presentation uploaded to personal project page
12 Thursday 15 December 10:30 -- 13:00 Evaluation M.G.004 Project "reading/planned work" presentations (you need to be present for all presentations)
12 Friday 16 December 13:45 -- 15:45 Optional G.T.135 MoSIS guest lecture on Modelling Complex Engineered Systems in Industry with Matlab/Simulink by Dr. Pieter Mosterman of The Mathworks, Natick, MA
12 Friday 16 December 16:00 -- 18:00 Evaluation M.G.016 Project "reading/planned work" presentations (you need to be present for all presentations)
13 Friday 23 December 13:45 -- 15:45 Project M.G.116/M.G.330/M.G.317 Individual meetings about project
13 Friday 23 December 16:00 -- 18:00 Project M.G.116/M.G.330/M.G.317 Individual meetings about project
Monday 30 January 13:00 Deadline Project report, implementation and presentation uploaded to personal project page
Friday 3 February 13:00 -- 16:30 Evaluation M.G.005 Project presentations (you need to be present for all presentations)

  Grading Scheme

Micro theory exam written 10%
Assignments 10% per assignment 50%
Project reading part (7% on report, 3% on presentation) 10%
Project project part (10% on report, 10% on work, 10% on presentation) 30%

Note that you need to pass (i.e., obtain a score of at least 50%) all parts of the course to pass. If not, your grade will be "AFW" - absent. If you do attend/submit every part, you still need an overall score of 50% to pass the course. Additionally, if for at least one part your score is strictly below 40%, your overall grade will be min(7, your_score). your_score is the score you would get when applying the weights given above.

For the supplemental exam period, partial exemptions for specific parts of the course may be given. This is discussed individually.


A project typically contains a "reading" part and a "building" part. The first part describes (in a report and a presentation) what you found in the literature and/or by trying/evaluating existing tools. The second part will describe your own (prototype) development/implementation (possibly using MDE tools). The whole project will be due during the January 2017 exam period. A date will be fixed for the project presentations to be attended by all (and evaluated by all). The "reading" presentations will be held during the last lecture slot of the semester. After around mid November, there will be no more formal lectures, but rather individual meetings to discuss project progress. Those individual meetings (by appointment, made via e-mail) will actually start the moment project topics have been chosen.

The micro theory exam will cover the highlighted papers below. It is intended to refresh your knowledge of the topics covered in the theory lectures.

  Lectures and References

Blackboard scribbles [pdf].

Domain-Specific Modelling Languages: the need for Modelling Language Engineering
Presentation [pdf]. This presentation covers Domain-Specific Modelling (DSM) and Meta-Modelling (and some more not covered in class).

Modelling Languages: Meta-Modelling (Abstract Syntax)
Thomas Kühne. Matters of (Meta-) Modeling. Software and System Modeling 5(4): 369-385. 2006. [pdf].
Linguistic Conformance Check (as implemented in the Modelverse).
Colin Atkinson and Thomas Kühne. Rearchitecting the UML infrastructure. ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS). Volume 12, Issue 4. pp 290 - 321. October 2002. [pdf].
Jean-Marie Favre. Megamodelling and Etymology. Proceedings of Dagstuhl Seminar 05161 - Transformation Techniques in Software Engineering. 2006. [pdf].
Jonathan Sprinkle, Bernhard Rumpe, Hans Vangheluwe, and Gabor Karsai. Metamodelling: State of the Art and Research Challenges. In Model-Based Engineering of Embedded Real-Time Systems. Volume 6100 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, chapter 3, pages 57-76. Springer 2011. [pdf].

Modelling Languages: Concrete Visual Syntax
Presentation [pdf].
G. Costagliola, A. Delucia, S. Orefice and G. Polese. A Classification Framework to Support the Design of Visual Languages, Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, Volume 13, Issue 6, December 2002, pages 573-600. [pdf].
Daniel L. Moody. The "Physics" of Notations: Toward a Scientific Basis for Constructing Visual Notations in Software Engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 35, no. 6, pp. 756-779, November/December, 2009. [pdf].
(unicode) Characters vs. Glyphs [pdf]

Modelling Languages: Semantics
Presentation [pdf].
David Harel, Bernhard Rumpe. Meaningful Modeling: What's the Semantics of "Semantics"?, IEEE Computer, vol. 37, no. 10, pp. 64-72, October, 2004. [pdf].
David Harel, Bernhard Rumpe. Syntax, Semantics, and all that stuff (the original technical report on which the IEEE Computer paper is based).
Hans Vangheluwe and Juan de Lara. Computer Automated Multi-Paradigm Modelling for Analysis and Design of Traffic Networks. Winter Simulation Conference 2004, pages 249-258. [pdf].

Model Transformation
Model Transformation. Presentation [pdf].
Thomas Kuehne, Gergely Mezei, Eugene Syriani, Hans Vangheluwe, and Manuel Wimmer. Explicit transformation modeling. In Models in Software Engineering, Workshops and Symposia at MODELS 2009, Revised Selected Papers, volume 6002 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), pages 240-255. Springer-Verlag, 2010. [pdf]

Putting it all together: the FTG+PM
Formalism Transformation Graph and Process Model. Presentation [pdf]
New presentation [pdf]

  Tools

metaDepth, a framework for multi-level meta-modelling
AToMPM, A Tool for Multi-Paradim Modelling. (AToMPM's website)
To whet your appetite: the AToMPM teaser video for the MoDELS 2013 conference.
A tutorial on AToMPM can be found here.
The AToMPM user manual [LINK].

  Examples

The examples page will be updated after each practical session. It will demonstrate the techniques learned using a simple, but complete, example.

  Assignments

1. Domain-Specific Modelling: meta-modelling (abstract syntax modelling) and action-code based operational semantics for a railway formalism in metaDepth.
2. Domain-Specific Modelling: meta-modelling (abstract and concrete syntax modelling) for a railway formalism in AToMPM.
3. Domain-Specific Modelling: rule-based model transformation for operational semantics of a railway formalism in AToMPM.
4. Domain-Specific Modelling: rule-based model transformation for translational semantics of a railway formalism (by mapping onto Petri Nets).
5. Domain-Specific Modelling: template-based model-to-text transformation for code synthesis.

  Projects

Topics
A list of tentative project topics can be found here.

Report info
Your project report should be written in LaTeX. If you're new to LaTeX, many tutorials such as this LaTeX primer are available.
You must use Elsevier's elsarticle style. You should download the elsarticle.zip archive. elsdoc.pdf contains the user documentation and elsarticle-template-harv.tex is the document template you should use as a starting point for your report.
Your report should contain at least the following:
  • A title capturing the essence of your work.
  • Author name, affiliation, and contact information.
  • An abstract presenting the paper's contribution. Based on the abstract, readers will decide whether or not your paper is worth reading.
  • Keywords summarising the paper.
  • A introduction presenting the problem/context. The introduction section should end with an overview of the rest of the paper. For example: ``Section 2 gives an overview of related work. Section 3 presents the design of our new architecture. ... Section 7 concludes.
  • A related work section, with references. If it is not elaborate enough to warrant its own section, related work may go into the introduction section.
  • A number of sections presenting the details of your contribution. This could contain details of your design.
  • If applicable, a section presenting the experience with using your work, including a performance evaluation.
  • A comparison of your work with that of others (what is new/better/...).
  • Conclusions and future work.
  • A bibliography. You must use bibTeX!
Note that your report should be a cross between a journal publication (where only the essence of the novel contribution should be presented) and a technical report (where technical details may be explained and there is no limitation on the number of pages used).

Presentation info
Some criteria for a good presentation.

Project Material
Corrado Ballabio Domain-Specific Modelling of complex User Interfaces project page
Olivier Bellemans Ontologies (to reason about properties) project page
Gitte Bluekens Layout in Visual Modelling project page
Andrés Carrasco Textual languages - Xtext project page
Matteo Guastella Translating Statecharts to behaviourally equivalent Petri Nets project page
Dominique Heer Papyrus modelling environment project page
Lucas Heer mbeddr project page
Manuel Orellana Cordero Semantic adaptation: Statecharts-CBDs project page
Arkadiusz Rys Graphical modelling with the Sirius framework project page
Simon Van Laerhoven Instance-based automatic language generation project page
Stig Bosmans project page

Maintained by Hans Vangheluwe Last Modified: 2017/09/29 09:22:14.