Exam Topics MDE

Material can be found on the course website.

The questions on the "closed book" (i.e., no course material may be used) exam will be a selection from those given below.

Important: if there is material in a paper that was not covered in class (in the slides or on the board), then you do not need to know it. Conversely, what was written on the board, or was covered in the slides, even if it does not appear in the papers, you should know.

Questions:

  1. From the Matters of Meta-Modelling paper: be able to explain Figure 5. Ontological versus Linguistic Instantiation (I will give you this figure or some variant of it).
  2. From that same paper (and my presentation): the relationship between language, intension and extension. Also from that paper: what is meta-modelling, as well as properties such as acyclic, anti-transitive and level-respecting. And of course, Stachoviak's definition of a model (its properties).
  3. From my presentation: what does Favre mean by "nothing is a model"? Note that this refers to slide 21 in the MoSIS presentation on complexity and modelling.
  4. From the Costagliola paper: be able to reproduce Figure 12. VL classes inclusion hierarchy as well as explain each of the elements and give examples/recognize cases.
  5. From Moody's paper: know and be able to explain all of Moody's principles (in Figure 9). Be able to give examples and recognize cases. (not in academic year 2024/25)
  6. From the Model and Screen Sharing paper: understand the differences, be able to explain figures such as 5. and 6.
  7. You should know (from the assignments and the lectures) about the difference between operational and denotational (translational) semantics.
  8. Regarding model transformation, you should know the material I gave in the presentation. This includes in particular the scribbles introducing pivot and scope, rule scheduling, and the outline of the VF2 algorithm.
  9. I will also give you a simple example for which you will have to apply RAMification (described in Thomas Kuehne, Gergely Mezei, Eugene Syriani, Hans Vangheluwe, and Manuel Wimmer. Explicit transformation modeling. In Models in Software Engineering).
  10. ProMoBox as described in Bart Meyers, Romuald Deshayes, Levi Lucio, Eugene Syriani, Hans Vangheluwe, Manuel Wimmer. ProMoBox: A Framework for Generating Domain-Specific Property Languages. In particular, be able to explain (1) the architecture, (2) the different sub-languages and (3) the annotated meta-model (to generate and keep sub-languages consistent) as described in the presentation (only upto slide 28). You should know the different sub-languages, but meta-model figures will be given.
  11. Variability modelling as described in Krzysztof Czarnecki: Overview of Generative Software Development. UPP 2004. As the second paper K.C. Kang, H. Lee. Variability Modeling. In Systems and Software Variability Management. is no longer publicly available, you can find it at the URL I announced on BlackBoard
  12. Template-based model to text transformation. Understand the principle of the technique. Presented by Joeri during the last lecture.