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© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works, Chatbots are programs that supply services to users via conversation in natural language, acting as virtual assistants within social networks or web applications. Here, we review the most representative chatbot development tools with a focus on technical and managerial aspects, This work was partially funded by the R&D program of the Madrid Region (project FORTE, S2018/TCS4314), and the Spanish Ministry of Science (project MASSIVE, RTI2018-095255-B-I00)

In the context of software engineering, mutation consists in injecting small changes in artefacts – like models, programs, or data – for purposes like (mutation) testing, test data generation, and all sorts of search-based methods. These tasks typically require defining sets of mutation operators, which are often built ad-hoc because there is currently poor support for their development and testing. To improve this situation, we propose a methodology and corresponding tool support for the proper engineering of mutation operators. Our proposal is model-based, representing the artefacts to be mutated as models. It includes a domain-specific language to describe the mutation operators, facilities to synthesize models that can be used to test the operators, different metrics to analyse operator coverage, and services to generate operators when the coverage is insufficient. We show automated support atop the WODEL tool, and illustrate its use by defining mutation operators for UML Class Diagrams., This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science (RTI2018-095255-B-I00), by the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2018/TCS-4314) and by the Spanish MINECO-FEDER (grant number FAME RTI2018-093608-BC31)

Modelling is an essential activity in software engineering processes. It typically involves two meta-levels: one includes meta-models that describe modelling languages, and the other contains models built by instantiating those meta-models. Multi-level modelling generalizes this approach by allowing models to span an arbitrary number of meta-levels. A scenario that profits from multi-level modelling is the definition of language families that become specialized by successive refinements at subsequent meta-levels, hence promoting language reuse. This enables an open set of variability options for the possible specializations of a given language. However, multi-level modelling lacks the ability to express closed variability regarding the supported language primitives and their realizations. This limits the reuse opportunities of a language family. To improve this situation, we propose a novel combination of product lines with multi-level modelling to cover both open and closed variability. Our proposal is backed by a formal theory that guarantees correctness, and is implemented atop the MetaDepth multi-level modelling tool., Work funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science (project MASSIVE, RTI2018-095255-B-I00) and the R&D programme of Madrid (project FORTE, P2018/TCS-4314).

Modelling is a core activity in software development paradigms like Model-driven Engineering (MDE). Therefore, the quality of (meta-)models is crucial for the success of software projects. However, many times, modelling becomes a purely manual activity, which does not take advantage of information embedded in heterogeneous information sources, such as XML documents, ontologies, or other models and meta-models. In order to improve this situation, we present EXTREMO, an Eclipse plugin aimed at gathering the information stored in heterogeneous sources in a common data model, to facilitate the reuse of information chunks in the model being built. The tool covers the steps needed to incorporate this knowledge within an external modelling tool, supporting the uniform query of the heterogeneous sources and the evaluation of constraints. Flexibility of the main features (e.g., supported data formats, queries)is achieved by means of extensible mechanisms. To illustrate the usefulness of EXTREMO, we describe a practical case study in the financial domain and evaluate its performance and scalability, This work was partially supported by the Ministry of Education of Spain (FPU grant FPU13/02698), the Spanish Ministry of Science (RTI2018-095255-B-I00), and the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2018/TCS-4314)

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Information Systems. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Information Systems, VOL 62, (2016)] DOI 10.1016/j.is.2016.06.008, Meta-models play a cornerstone role in Model-Driven Engineering as they are used to define the abstract syntax of modelling languages, and so models and all sorts of model transformations depend on them. However, there are scarce tools and methods supporting their Validation and Verification (V&V), which are essential activities for the proper engineering of meta-models. In order to fill this gap, we propose two complementary meta-model V&V languages. The first one has similar philosophy to the xUnit framework, as it enables the definition of meta-model unit test suites comprising model fragments and assertions on their (in-)correctness. The second one is directed to express and verify expected properties of a meta-model, including domain and design properties, quality criteria and platform-specific requirements. As a proof of concept, we have developed tooling for both languages in the Eclipse platform, and illustrate its use within an example-driven approach for meta-model construction. The expressiveness of our languages is demonstrated by their application to build a library of meta-model quality issues, which has been evaluated over the ATL zoo of meta-models and some OMG specifications. The results show that integrated support for meta-model V&V (as the one we propose here) is urgently needed in meta-modelling environments., This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with project “Flexor” (TIN2014-52129-R), the region of Madrid with project “SICOMORO-CM” (S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU commission with project “MONDO” (FP7- ICT-2013-10, #611125).

Model driven Engineering (MDE) advocates the active use of models throughout the different software development phases. In MDE, models are described using meta-models, one meta-level above. This approach effectively leaves developers with one single meta-level to create their models. However, there are scenarios where the use of multiple meta-levels results in simpler models with less accidental complexity. Hence, to simplify modelling in these cases, several multi-level modelling approaches and tools have recently emerged to increase the flexibility in modelling. While they provide advanced primitives to simplify modelling, there are possibilities to improve interoperability with mainstream two-level modelling approaches based on the Meta-Object Facility (MOF) standard of the Object Management Group (OMG), and achieve wider adoption. For this purpose, we first characterise the design space of multi-level modelling approaches using a feature model. On such a basis, we provide a detailed comparison of existing multi-level modelling tools, identifying gaps and research opportunities. As a result of this gap analysis, we propose a new approach to multi-level modelling that embeds multiple meta-levels within one meta-model (i.e., encoding objects as classes, and instantiation as inheritance), and a tool – called TOTEM – which implements these concepts. The tool capabilities and its benefits in terms of interoperability with mainstream, standard modelling frameworks are illustrated through an example, as well as with empirical and analytical evaluations, We thank the reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped us improving the content of the paper. This work has been partially funded by the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (project FORTE, S2018/TCS-4314), and the Spanish Ministry of Science (project MASSIVE, RTI2018-095255-B-I00)

This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in SAC '15 Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2695664.2695717., This paper describes a new modelling language for the ef- fective design of Java annotations. Since their inclusion in the 5th edition of Java, annotations have grown from a use- ful tool for the addition of meta-data to play a central role in many popular software projects. Usually they are con- ceived as sets with dependency and integrity constraints within them; however, the native support provided by Java for expressing this design is very limited. To overcome its de ciencies and make explicit the rich conceptual model which lies behind a set of annotations, we propose a domain-speci c modelling language. The proposal has been implemented as an Eclipse plug- in, including an editor and an integrated code generator that synthesises annotation processors. The language has been tested using a real set of annotations from the Java Per- sistence API (JPA). It has proven to cover a greater scope with respect to other related work in di erent shared areas of application., This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with project Go-Lite (TIN2011-24139) and the Community of Madrid with project SICOMORO (S2013/ICE-3006).

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) uses models as its main assets in the software development process. The structure of a model is described through a metamodel. Even though modelling and meta-modelling are recurrent activities in MDE and a vast amount of MDE tools exist nowadays, they are tasks typically performed in an unassisted way. Usually, these tools cannot extract useful knowledge available in heterogeneous information sources like XML, RDF, CSV or other models and meta-models. We propose an approach to provide modelling and meta-modelling assistance. The approach gathers heterogeneous information sources in various technological spaces, and represents them uniformly in a common data model. This enables their uniform querying, by means of an extensible mechanism, which can make use of services, e.g., for synonym search and word sense analysis. The query results can then be easily incorporated into the (meta-)model being built. The approach has been realized in the Extremo tool, developed as an Eclipse plugin. Extremo has been validated in the context of two domains { production systems and process modelling { taking into account a large and complex industrial standard for classi cation and product description. Further validation results indicate that the integration of Extremo in various modelling environments can be achieved with low e ort, and that the tool is able to handle information from most existing technological spaces, This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of 1256 Spain (FPU grant FPU13/02698); the Spanish MINECO (TIN2014-52129-R);1257 the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006); the Austrian 1258 agency for international mobility and cooperation in education, science and re1259 search (OeAD) by funds from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research 1260 and Economy - BMWFW (ICM-2016-04969)

The verification of safety requirements becomes crucial in critical systems where human lives depend on their correct functioning. Formal methods have often been advocated as necessary to ensure the reliability of software systems, albeit with a considerable effort. In any case, such an effort is cost-effective when verifying safety-critical systems. Often, safety requirements are expressed using safety contracts, in terms of assumptions and guarantees. To facilitate the adoption of formal methods in the safety-critical software industry, we propose a methodology based on well-known modelling languages such as the unified modelling language and object constraint language. The unified modelling language is used to model the software system while object constraint language is used to express the system safety contracts within the unified modelling language. In the proposed methodology a unified modelling language model enriched with object constraint language constraints is transformed to a Petri net model that enables us to formally verify such safety contracts. The methodology is evaluated on an industrial case study. The proposed approach allows an early safety verification to be performed, which increases the confidence of software engineers while designing the system, The research of the authorswas supported in part by theARTEMISJoint Undertaking under grant agreement no. 295373 (project nSafeCer) and by National funding. The research of Ricardo J. Rodríguez was also supported in part by EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 644869 (DICE) and by Spanish MINECO project CyCriSec (TIN2014-58457-R). The research of Clara Benac Earle was also supported by Spanish MINECO project STRONGSOFT (TIN2012-39391-C04-02) and by the Madrid Regional Government project nGreens (S2013/ICE-2731)

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00165-014-0307-x, Metamodelling is one of the pillars of model-driven engineering, used for language engineering and domain modelling. Even though metamodelling is traditionally based on a two-metalevel approach, several researchers have pointed out limitations of this solution and proposed an alternative deep (also called multi-level) approach to obtain simpler system specifications. However, this approach currently lacks a formalisation that can be used to explain fundamental concepts such as deep characterisation, double linguistic/ontological typing and linguistic extension. This paper provides such a formalisation based on the Diagram Predicate Framework, and discusses its practical realisation in the metaDepth tool., This work was partially funded by the SpanishMinistry of Economy and Competitiveness (project “Go Lite” TIN2011- 24139).

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming 83.5-6 (2014) , DOI:10.1016/j.jlamp.2014.08.005, This special issue of the Journal of Logic and Algebraic Methods in Programming (JLAMP) includes full revised versions of selected papers that were presented at the 24th Nordic Workshop on Programming Theory (NWPT 2012). The workshop took place in Bergen, Norway, during 31 October–2 November 2012 and was organized by the Department of Informatics, University of Bergen, and the Bergen University College., Model transformations are the heart and soul of Model Driven Engineering (MDE). However, in order to increase the adoption of MDE by industry, techniques for developing model transformations in the large and raising the quality and productivity in their construction, like reusability, are still needed. In previous works, we developed a reutilization approach for graph transformations based on the definition of concepts, which gather the structural requirements needed by meta-models to qualify for the transformations. Reusable transformations are typed by concepts, becoming transformation templates. Transformation templates are instantiated by binding the concept to a concrete meta-model, inducing a retyping of the transformation for the given meta-model. This paper extends the approach allowing heterogeneities between the concept and the metamodel, thus increasing the reuse opportunities of transformation templates. Heterogeneities are resolved by using algebraic adapters which induce both a retyping and an adaptation of the transformation. As an alternative, the adapters can also be employed to induce an adaptation of the meta-model, and in this work we show the conditions for equivalence of both approaches to transformation reuse., We thank the referees for their detailed comments, which helped to greatly improve the paper. This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with project Go-Lite (TIN2011-24139).

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10270-013-0392-y, The intensive use of models in model-driven engineering (MDE) raises the need to develop meta-models with different aims, such as the construction of textual and visual modelling languages and the specification of source and target ends of model-to-model transformations. While domain experts have the knowledge about the concepts of the domain, they usually lack the skills to build meta-models. Moreover, meta-models typically need to be tailored according to their future usage and specific implementation platform, which demands knowledge available only to engineers with great expertise in specific MDE platforms. These issues hinder a wider adoption of MDE both by domain experts and software engineers. In order to alleviate this situation, we propose an interactive, iterative approach to meta-model construction, enabling the specification of example model fragments by domain experts, with the possibility of using informal drawing tools like Dia or yED. These fragments can be annotated with hints about the intention or needs for certain elements. A meta-model is then automatically induced, which can be refactored in an interactive way, and then compiled into an implementation meta-model using profiles and patterns for different platforms and purposes. Our approach includes the use of a virtual assistant, which provides suggestions for improving the meta-model based on well-known refactorings, and a validation mode, enabling the validation of the meta-model by means of examples., This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with project “Go Lite” (TIN2011-24139), and by the R&D programme of Madrid Region with project “eMadrid” (S2009/TIC-1650).

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10270-013-0369-x, Testing model transformations poses several challenges, among them the automatic generation of appropriate input test models and the specification of oracle functions. Most approaches for the generation of input models ensure a certain coverage of the source meta-model or the transformation implementation code, whereas oracle functions are frequently defined using query or graph languages. However, these two tasks are usually performed independently regardless of their common purpose, and sometimes, there is a gap between the properties exhibited by the generated input models and those considered by the transformations. Recently, we proposed a formal specification language for the declarative formulation of transformation properties (by means of invariants, pre-, and postconditions) from which we generated partial oracle functions used for transformation testing. Here, we extend the usage of our specification language for the automated generation of input test models by SAT solving. The testing process becomes more intentional because the generated models ensure a certain coverage of the transformation requirements. Moreover, we use the same specification to consistently derive both the input test models and the oracle functions. A set of experiments is presented, aimed at measuring the efficacy of our technique., We thank the referees for their useful comments. This work has been sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation with project “Go-Lite” (TIN2011-24139), by the R&D program of the Community of Madrid with project “e- Madrid” (S2009/TIC-1650), and by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Reinhart Koselleck project (DR 287/23-1).

This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in ASE 2016: Proceedings of the 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/10.1145/2970276.2970328, Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are central to Model- Driven Engineering, where they are used for creating models for particular domains. However, current research and tools for building DSLs focus on the design and implementation aspects of the DSL, while the requirements analysis phase, and its automated transition to design is largely neglected. In order to alleviate this situation, we propose DSL-maps, a notation inspired by mind-maps, to represent requirements for DSLs. The notation is supported by a tool, which helps in the automated transition into an initial meta-model de- sign, using a customizable transformation and recommenda- tions from a catalogue of meta-model design patterns., Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with project Flexor (TIN2014-52129-R), the EU commission with project MONDO (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125) and the Madrid Region with project SICOMORO (S2013/ICE-3006).

Model transformations are central compo- nents of most model-based software projects. While en- suring their correctness is vital to guarantee the quality of the solution, current transformation tools provide lim- ited support to statically detect and x errors. In this way, the identi cation of errors and their correction are nowadays mostly manual activities which incur in high costs. The aim of this work is to improve this situation. Recently, we developed a static analyser that com- bines program analysis and constraint solving to iden- tify errors in ATL model transformations. In this paper, we present a novel method and system that uses our analyser to propose suitable quick xes for ATL transfor- mation errors, notably some non-trivial, transformation- speci c ones. Our approach supports speculative analy- sis to help developers select the most appropriate x by creating a dynamic ranking of xes, reporting on the consequences of applying a quick x, and providing a previsualization of each quick x application. The approach integrates seamlessly with the ATL ed- itor. Moreover, we provide an evaluation based on exist- ing faulty transformations built by a third party, and on automatically generated transformation mutants, which are then corrected with the quick xes of our catalogue, Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economyand Competitivity (TIN2014-52129-R), the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU commission (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125)

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Systems and Software. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Systems and Software, VOL 116, (2016) DOI 10.1016/j.jss.2015.08.017, Model transformations are key elements of Model Driven Engineering. Current challenges for transformation languages include improving usability (i.e., succinct means to express the transformation intent) and devising powerful analysis methods. In this paper, we show how backwards reasoning helps in both respects. The reasoning is based on a method that, given an OCL expression and a transformation rule, calculates a constraint that is satisfiable before the rule application if and only if the original OCL expression is satisfiable afterwards. With this method we can improve the usability of the rule execution process by automatically deriving suitable application conditions for a rule (or rule sequence) to guarantee that applying that rule does not break any integrity constraint (e.g. meta-model constraints). When combined with model finders, this method facilitates the validation, verification, testing and diagnosis of transformations, and we show several applications for both inplace and exogenous transformations., Work partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (projects TIN2008-00444, TIN2011-24139 and TIN2014-52129-R), the Community of Madrid with project SICOMORO (S2013/ICE-3006), the EU Commission with project MONDO (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125) and a research grant from UOC-IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute). We would like to thank Hamza Ed-Douibi for his work on the tool implementation part, and the reviewers for their useful comments.

Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 144, no. 2, pp. 109-160, 2016, Copyright 2016, with permission from IOS Press, Model-based development relies on models in different phases for different purposes, with modelling patterns being used to document and gather knowledge about good practices in specific domains, to analyse the quality of existing designs, and to guide the construction and refactoring of models. Providing a formal basis for the use of patterns would also support their integration with existing approaches to model transformation. To this end, we turn to the commonly used, in this context, machinery of graph transformations and provide an algebraic-categorical formalization of modelling patterns, which can express variability and required/forbidden application contexts. This allows the definition of transformation rules having patterns in left and right-hand sides, which can be used to express refactorings towards patterns, change the use of one pattern by a different one, or switch between pattern variants. A key element in our proposal is the use of operations to abstract models into patterns, so that they can be manipulated by pattern rules, thus leading to a rewriting mechanism for classes of graphs described by patterns and not just individual graphs. The proposal is illustrated with examples in object-oriented software design patterns and enterprise architecture patterns, but can be applied to any other domain where patterns are used for modelling., This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with projects Go-Lite (TIN2011-24139) and Flexor (TIN2014-52129-R), the Madrid Region with project SICOMORO (S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU commission with project MONDO (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125).

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10515-012-0102-y, Model-Driven Engineering promotes the use of models to conduct the different phases of the software development. In this way, models are transformed between different languages and notations until code is generated for the final application. Hence, the construction of correct Model-to-Model (M2M) transformations becomes a crucial aspect in this approach. Even though many languages and tools have been proposed to build and execute M2M transformations, there is scarce support to specify correctness requirements for such transformations in an implementation-independent way, i.e., irrespective of the actual transformation language used. In this paper we fill this gap by proposing a declarative language for the specification of visual contracts, enabling the verification of transformations defined with any transformation language. The verification is performed by compiling the contracts into QVT to detect disconformities of transformation results with respect to the contracts. As a proof of concept, we also report on a graphical modeling environment for the specification of contracts, and on its use for the verification of transformations in several case studies., This work has been funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant P21374-N13, the Spanish Ministry of Science under grants TIN2008-02081 and TIN2011-24139, and the R&D programme of the Madrid Region under project S2009/TIC-1650.

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10270-011-0211-2, Model transformation is one of the pillars of model-driven engineering (MDE). The increasing complexity of systems and modelling languages has dramatically raised the complexity and size of model transformations as well. Even though many transformation languages and tools have been proposed in the last few years, most of them are directed to the implementation phase of transformation development. In this way, even though transformations should be built using sound engineering principles—just like any other kind of software—there is currently a lack of cohesive support for the other phases of the transformation development, like requirements, analysis, design and testing. In this paper, we propose a unified family of languages to cover the life cycle of transformation development enabling the engineering of transformations. Moreover, following an MDE approach, we provide tools to partially automate the progressive refinement of models between the different phases and the generation of code for several transformation implementation languages., This work has been sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation with project METEORIC (TIN2008-02081), and by the R&D program of the Community of Madrid with projects “e-Madrid" (S2009/TIC-1650). Parts of this work were done during the research stays of Esther and Juan at the University of York, with financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant refs. JC2009-00015, PR2009-0019 and PR2008-0185).

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42064-6_5, In the last years, the increasing complexity of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) tools and techniques has led to higher demands in terms of computation, interoperability, and configuration management. Harnessing the softwareas- a-service (SaaS) paradigm and shifting applications from local, mono-core implementations to cloud-based architectures is key to enhance scalability and flexibility. To this end, we propose MDEForge: an extensible, collaborative modeling platform that provides remote model management facilities and prevents the user from focussing on time-consuming, and less creative procedures. This demo paper illustrates the extensibility of MDEForge by integrating ATL services for the remote execution, automated testing, and static analysis of ATL transformations. The usefulness of their employment under the SaaS paradigm is demonstrated with a case-study showing a wide range of new application possibilities., Work supported by the Spanish MINECO (TIN2014-52129-R), the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU commission (#611125)

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42061-5_7, Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) present numerous benefits like powerful domain-specific primitives, an intuitive syntax for domain experts, and the possibility of advanced code generation for narrow domains. While a graphical syntax is sometimes desired for a DSL, constructing graphical modelling environments is a costly and highly technical task. This relegates domain experts to play a passive role in their development and hinders a wider adoption of graphical DSLs. Targeting a simpler DSL construction process, we propose an example based technique for the automatic generation of modelling environments for graphical DSLs. This way, starting from examples of the DSL likely provided by domain experts using drawing tools like yED, our system is able to synthesize a graphical modelling environment that mimics the syntax of the provided examples. This includes a meta-model for the abstract syntax of the DSL, and a graphical concrete syntax supporting spatial relationships like containment or attachment. The system is implemented as an Eclipse plugin, and we demonstrate its usage on a running example in the home networking domain., Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2014-52129-R), the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU Commission (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125).

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) promotes an active use of models in all phases of software development. In this paradigm, the design and usage of Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) for modelling in a certain application area is frequent. While in MDE, modelling has been traditionally supported by desktop computers, in this position paper we analyse useful scenarios for modelling using mobile devices, like smartphones or tablets. Moreover, we present a working architecture and a prototype tool, called DSL-comet, which enable collaborative mobile modelling and integrate seamlessly desktop and mobile graphical modelling environments., Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2014-52129-R), the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU commission (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125).

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Computer Languages, Systems & Structures. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Computer Languages, Systems & Structures, VOL 45, (2016) DOI 10.1016/j.cl.2016.02.002, This paper describes a new modelling language for the effective design and validation of Java annotations. Since their inclusion in the 5th edition of Java, annotations have grown from a useful tool for the addition of meta-data to play a central role in many popular software projects. Usually they are not conceived in isolation, but in groups, with dependency and integrity constraints between them. However, the native support provided by Java for expressing this design is very limited. To overcome its deficiencies and make explicit the rich conceptual model which lies behind a set of annotations, we propose a domain-specific modelling language. The proposal has been implemented as an Eclipse plug-in, including an editor and an integrated code generator that synthesises annotation processors. The environment also integrates a model finder, able to detect unsatisfiable constraints between different annotations, and to provide examples of correct annotation usages for validation. The language has been tested using a real set of annotations from the Java Persistence API (JPA). Within this subset we have found enough rich semantics expressible with Ann and omitted nowadays by the Java language, which shows the benefits of Ann in a relevant field of application., We would like to thank the reviewers for their detailed comments, which helped us in improving a previous version of this paper. This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with project FLEXOR (TIN2014-52129-R) and the Community of Madrid with project SICOMORO-CM (S2013/ICE-3006).

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. J. Sánchez Cuadrado, E. Guerra and J. de Lara, "Quick fixing ATL model transformations," Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), 2015 ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on, Ottawa, ON, 2015, pp. 146-155. doi: 10.1109/MODELS.2015.7338245, The correctness of model transformations is key to obtain reliable MDE solutions. However, current transformation tools provide limited support to statically detect and correct errors. This way, the identification of errors and their correction are mostly manual activities. Our aim is to improve this situation. Based on a static analyser for ATL model transformations which we have previously built, we present a method and a system to propose quick fixes for transformation errors. The analyser is based on a combination of program analysis and constraint solving, and our quick fix generation technique makes use of the analyser features to provide a range of fixes, notably some nontrivial, transformation-specific ones. Our approach integrates seamlessly with the ATL editor. We provide an evaluation based on an existing faulty transformation, and automatically generated transformation mutants, showing overall good results., Work supported by the Spanish MINECO (TIN2011-24139 and TIN2014-52129-R), the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU commission (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125).

This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in SLE 2015: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/10.1145/2814251.2814256, The definition of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) is a recurrent activity in Model-Driven Engineering. However, their construction is many times an ad-hoc process, partly due to the lack of tools enabling a proper engineering of DSLs and promoting domain experts to play an active role. The focus of this paper is on the validation of meta- models for visual DSLs. For this purpose, we propose a language and tool support for describing properties that in- stances of meta-models should (or should not) meet. Then, our system uses a model finder to produce example models, enriched with a graphical concrete syntax, that confirm or refute the assumptions of the meta-model developer. Our language complements metaBest, a framework for the validation and verification of meta-models that includes two other languages for unit testing and specification-based test- ing of meta-models. A salient feature of our approach is that it fosters interaction with domain experts by the use, process- ing and creation of informal drawings constructed in editors liked yED or Dia. We assess the usefulness of the approach in the validation of a DSL for house blueprints, with the par- ticipation of 26 4th year computer science students., Work supported by the Spanish MINECO (TIN2011-24139 and TIN2014-52129-R), the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU commission (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125).

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. N. Amálio, J. de Lara and E. Guerra, "Fragmenta: A theory of fragmentation for MDE," 2015 ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), Ottawa, ON, 2015, pp. 106-115. doi: 10.1109/MODELS.2015.7338241, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) promotes models throughout development. However, models may become large and unwieldy even for small to medium-sized systems. This paper tackles the MDE challenges of model complexity and scalability. It proposes FRAGMENTA, a theory of modular design that breaks down overall models into fragments that can be put together to build meaningful wholes, in contrast to classical MDE approaches that are essentially monolithic. The theory is based on an algebraic description of models, fragments and clusters based on graphs and morphisms. The paper’s novelties include: (i) a mathematical treatment of fragments and a seaming mechanism of proxies to enable inter-fragment referencing, (ii) fragmentation strategies, which prescribe a fragmentation structure to model instances, (iii) FRAGMENTA’s support for both top-down and bottom-up design, and (iv) our formally proved result that shows that inheritance hierarchies remain well-formed (acyclic) globally when fragments are composed provided some local fragment constraints are met., This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competivity (TIN2011-24139 and TIN2014-52129-R), Madrid’s Region R & D programme (S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU project MONDO (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125).

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. J. de Lara, E. Guerra and J. Sánchez Cuadrado, "A-posteriori typing for Model-Driven Engineering," 2015 ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), Ottawa, ON, 2015, pp. 156-165. doi: 10.1109/MODELS.2015.7338246, Model-Driven Engineering is founded on the ability to create and process models conformant to a meta-model. Hence, meta-model classes are used in two ways: as templates to create objects, and as classifiers for them. While these two aspects are inherently tied in most meta-modelling approaches, in this paper, we discuss the benefits of their decoupling. Thus, we rely on standard mechanisms for object creation and propose a-posteriori typing as a means to reclassify objects and enable multiple, partial, dynamic typings. This approach enhances flexibility, permitting unanticipated reutilization (as existing model management operations defined for a meta-model can be reused with other models once they get reclassified), as well as model transformation by reclassification.We show the underlying theory behind the introduced concepts, and illustrate its applicability using our METADEPTH meta-modelling tool., Work supported by the Spanish MINECO (TIN2011-24139 and TIN2014-52129-R), and the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006).

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10270-013-0367-z, Domain-specific modelling languages are normally defined through general-purpose meta-modelling languages like the MOF. While this is satisfactory for many model-driven engineering (MDE) projects, several researchers have identified the need for domain-specific meta-modelling (DSMM) languages. These provide customised domain-specific meta-modelling primitives aimed at the definition of modelling languages for a specific domain, as well as the construction of meta-model families. Unfortunately, current approaches to DSMM rely on ad hoc methods which add unnecessary complexity to the realization of DSMM in practice. Hence, the goal of this paper is to simplify the definition and usage of DSMM languages. For this purpose, we apply multi-level meta-modelling for the systematic engineering of DSMM architectures. Our method integrates techniques to control the meta-modelling primitives offered to the users of the DSMM languages, provides a flexible approach to define textual concrete syntaxes for DSMM languages, and extends existing model management languages (for model-to-model transformation, in-place transformation and code generation) to work in a multi-level setting, thus enabling the practical use of DSMM in MDE. As a proof of concept, we report on a working implementation of these ideas in the MetaDepth tool., We thank the referees for their detailed and useful comments. This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with project “Go Lite” (TIN2011-24139), and the R&D programme of Madrid Region with project “eMadrid” (S2009/TIC-1650).

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. A. Pescador, A. Garmendia, E. Guerra, J. Sánchez Cuadrado and J. de Lara, "Pattern-based development of Domain-Specific Modelling Languages," Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), 2015 ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on, Ottawa, ON, 2015, pp. 166-175. doi: 10.1109/MODELS.2015.7338247, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) promotes the use of models to conduct all phases of software development in an automated way. Models are frequently defined using Domain- Specific Modelling Languages (DSMLs), which many times need to be developed for the domain at hand. However, while constructing DSMLs is a recurring activity in MDE, there is scarce support for gathering, reusing and enacting knowledge for their design and implementation. This forces the development of every new DSML to start from scratch. To alleviate this problem, we propose the construction of DSMLs and their modelling environments aided by patterns which gather knowledge of specific domains, design alternatives, concrete syntax, dynamic semantics and functionality for the modelling environment. They may have associated services, realized via components. Our approach is supported by a tool that enables the construction of DSMLs through the application of patterns, and synthesizes a graphical modelling environment according to them., Work supported by the Spanish MINECO (TIN2011-24139 and TIN2014-52129-R), the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU commission (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125).

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27653-3_16, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) promotes the use of models to conduct all phases of software development in an automated way. Such models are described using Domain Specific Modelling Languages (DSMLs). While the definition of DSMLs and their supporting environments are recurring activities in MDE, they are mostly developed ad-hoc from scratch. This paper proposes the use of patterns to describe the abstract and concrete graphical syntax of DSMLs, and to automate the generation of a graphical modelling environment for them., Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2011-24139 and TIN2014-52129-R), the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU commission (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125).

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21151-0_2, The Cloud Modelling Framework (CloudMF) is an approach to apply model-driven engineering principles to the specification and execution of cloud-based applications. It comprises a domain-specific language to model the deployment topology of multi-cloud applications, along with a models@run-time environment to facilitate reasoning and adaptation of these applications at run-time. This paper reports on some challenges encountered during the design of CloudMF, related to the adoption of the two-level modelling approach and especially the type-instance pattern. Moreover, it proposes the adoption of an alternative, multi-level modelling approach to tackle these challenges, and provides a set of criteria to compare both approaches., The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement numbers 317715 (PaaSage), 318392 (Broker@Cloud), and 611125 (MONDO), the Spanish Ministry under project Go Lite (TIN2011-24139), and the Madrid Region under project SICOMORO (S2013/ICE-3006).

Also published online by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073), Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques, like transformations, queries, and code generators, were devised for local, single-CPU architectures. However, the increasing complexity of the systems to be built and their high demands in terms of computation, memory and storage, requires more scalable and flexible MDE techniques, likely using services and the cloud. Nonetheless, the cost of developing MDE solutions on the cloud is high without proper automation mechanisms. In order to alleviate this situation, we present DISTIL, a domain-specific language to describe MDE services, which is able to generate (NoSQL-based) respositories for the artefacts of interest, and skeletons for (single or composite) services, ready to be deployed in Heroku. We illustrate the approach through the construction of a repository and a set of cloud-based services for bent ¯o reusable transformation components., Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2011-24139, TIN2014-52129-R), the EU commission (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125) and the Community of Madrid (S2013/ICE-3006)

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21155-8_5, Building high-quality transformations that can be used in real projects is complex and time-consuming. For this reason, the ability to reuse existing transformations in different, unforeseen scenarios is very valuable. However, there is scarce tool support for this task. This paper presents bentō, a tool which supports the development and execution of reusable transformation components. In bentō, a reusable transformation is written as a regular ATL transformation, but it uses concepts as meta-models. Reuse is achieved by binding such concepts to meta-models, which induces the transformation adaptation. Moreover, composite components enable chaining transformations, and it is possible to convert an existing transformation into a reusable component. Bentō is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in, available as free software., This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with project Go-Lite (TIN2011-24139), the R&D programme of the Madrid Region with project (SICOMORO S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU commission with project MONDO (FP7-ICT 2013-10, #611125).

Also published online by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073), Model finders enable numerous verification approaches based on searching the existence of models satisfying certain properties of interest. One of such approaches is anATLyzer, a static analysis tool for ATL transformations, which relies on USE Validator to provide fine grained analysis based on finding witness models that satisfy the OCL path conditions associated to particular errors. However it is limited by the fact that USE Validator does not include built-in support for analysing recursive operations and the iterate collection operator. This paper reports our approach to allow USE Validator to analyse OCL path conditions containing recursive operations and iterate, with the aim of widening the amount of actual transformations that can be processed by anATLyzer. We present our approach, based on unfolding recursion into a finite number of steps, and we discuss how to take into account practical aspects such as inheritance and details about the implementation., This work has been supported by the Spanish MINECO (TIN2011-24139 and TIN2014-52129-R), the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU commission (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125).

Also published online by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073), Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) promotes the use of models to conduct all phases of software development in an automated way. However, for complex systems, these models may become large and unwieldy, and hence difficult to process and comprehend. In order to alleviate this situation, we explore the combination of model fragmentation strategies, to split models into more manageable chunks; and model abstraction and visualization mechanisms, able to provide simpler views of the models. The feasibility of this combination is confirmed based on an evaluation over a synthetic models, and the model sets of the GraBaTs’09 contest., Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2011-24139, TIN2014-52129-R), the EU commission (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125) and the Community of Madrid (S2013/ICE-3006)

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Science of Computer Programming. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Science of Computer Programming, 89, Part B, (2014) DOI 10.1016/j.scico.2013.04.007, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is increasingly gaining acceptance in the software engineering community, however its adoption by the industry is far from successful. The number of companies applying MDE is still very limited. Although several case studies and reports have been published on MDE adoption in large companies, experience reports on small enterprises are still rare, despite the fact that they represent a large part of the software companies ecosystem. In this paper we report on our practical experience in two transfer of technology projects on two small companies. In order to determine the degree of success of these projects we present some factors that have to be taken into account in transfer of technology projects. Then, we assess both projects analyzing these factors and applying some metrics to give hints about the potential productivity gains that MDE could bring. We also comment on some lessons learned. These experiences suggest that MDE has the potential to make small companies more competitive, because it enables them to build powerful automation tools at modest cost. We will also present the approach followed to train these companies in MDE, and we contribute the teaching material so that it can be used or adapted by others projects of this nature., This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (project “Go Lite” TIN2011-24139), by the European Commission under the ICT Policy Support Programme, grant no. 317859, and by Fundacion Séneca-CARM (grant 15389/PI/10).

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10270-012-0242-3, Graph transformation is being increasingly used to express the semantics of domain-specific visual languages since its graphical nature makes rules intuitive. However, many application domains require an explicit handling of time to accurately represent the behaviour of a real system and to obtain useful simulation metrics to measure throughputs, utilization times and average delays. Inspired by the vast knowledge and experience accumulated by the discrete event simulation community, we propose a novel way of adding explicit time to graph transformation rules. In particular, we take the event scheduling discrete simulation world view and provide rules with the ability to schedule the occurrence of other rules in the future. Hence, our work combines standard, efficient techniques for discrete event simulation (based on the handling of a future event set) and the intuitive, visual nature of graph transformation. Moreover, we show how our formalism can be used to give semantics to other timed approaches and provide an implementation on top of the rewriting logic system Maude., Work partially sponsored by the Spanish Ministry, under project “Go Lite” (TIN2011-24139) as well as by the R&D programme of the Community of Madrid, project “e-Madrid” (S2009/TIC-1650). We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers, which helped in improving previous versions of the paper.

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10270-011-0221-0, Model-driven engineering (MDE) is a software engineering paradigm that proposes an active use of models during the development process. This paradigm is inherently type-centric, in the sense that models and their manipulation are defined over the types of specific meta-models. This fact hinders the reuse of existing MDE artefacts with other meta-models in new contexts, even if all these meta-models share common characteristics. To increase the reuse opportunities of MDE artefacts, we propose a paradigm shift from type-centric to requirement-centric specifications by bringing genericity into models, meta-models and model management operations. For this purpose, we introduce so-called concepts gathering structural and behavioural requirements for models and meta-models. In this way, model management operations are defined over concepts, enabling the application of the operations to any meta-model satisfying the requirements imposed by the concept. Model templates rely on concepts to define suitable interfaces, hence enabling the definition of reusable model components. Finally, similar to mixin layers, templates can be defined at the meta-model level as well, to define languages in a modular way, as well as layers of functionality to be plugged-in into other meta-models. These ideas have been implemented in MetaDepth, a multi-level meta-modelling tool that integrates action languages from the Epsilon family for model management and code generation., This work has been sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation with projects METEORIC (TIN2008-02081) and Go Lite (TIN2011-24139), and by the R&D program of the Community of Madrid with project “e-Madrid” (S2009/TIC-1650).

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.I. D. Carlos, R. Cobos, E. Guerra, J. de Lara, A. Pescador, and J. Sánchez Cuadrado, “Integrating Open Services for Building Educational Environments”, in Global Engineering Education Conference, Berlin (Germany), 2013, pp. 1147-1156, The increasing popularity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has raised the need for highly scalable, customizable, open learning environments. At the same time, there is a growing trend to open the services that the companies offer on the web with open APIs and in the form of REST services, facilitating their integration in customized applications. The goal of this work is to show how such open services can be used for the support of on-line educational systems. These services were not created for an education context, so it is necessary to complement it with functionalities for supporting aspects such as evaluations, monitoring or collaboration. This article discusses on the strategies for integrating services for education and presents two cases studies: first, SMLearning, a collaborative learning environment supported by social media platforms Facebook and YouTube, and second, an application for project-based programming courses, customized through a generative architecture, making heavy use of Google services., This research was partly funded by the Spanish National Plan of R+D, project number TIN2011-24139; and by the Autonomous Community of Madrid, e-Madrid project, number S2009/TIC-1650.

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Information Systems. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Information Systems, 38, 8, (2013) DOI: 10.1016/j.is.2013.06.001, Model-driven engineering proposes the use of models to describe the relevant aspects of the system to be built and synthesize the final application from them. Models are normally described using Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs), which provide primitives and constructs of the domain. Still, the increasing complexity of systems has raised the need for abstraction techniques able to produce simpler versions of the models while retaining some properties of interest. The problem is that developing such abstractions for each DSML from scratch is time and resource consuming. In this paper, our goal is reducing the effort to provide modeling languages with abstraction mechanisms. For this purpose, we have devised some techniques, based on generic programming and domain-specific meta-modeling, to define generic abstraction operations that can be reused over families of modeling languages sharing certain characteristics. Abstractions can make use of clustering algorithms as similarity criteria for model elements. These algorithms can be made generic as well, and customized for particular languages by means of annotation models. As a result, we have developed a catalog of reusable abstractions using the proposed techniques, together with a working implementation in the MetaDepth multi-level meta-modeling tool. Our techniques and prototypes demonstrate that it is feasible to build reusable and adaptable abstractions, so that similar abstractions need not be developed from scratch, and their integration in new or existing modeling languages is less costly., Work funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with project “Go Lite” (TIN2011-24139), and the R&D programme of Madrid Region with project “eMadrid” (S2009/TIC-1650).

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38883-5_1, Proceedings of 6th International Conference, ICMT 2013, Budapest, Hungary, June 18-19, 2013, Several styles of model transformations are well-known and widely used, such as batch, live, incremental and lazy transformations. While they permit tackling advanced scenarios, some applications deal with models that are only available as a possibly infinite stream of elements. Hence, in streaming transformations, source model elements are continuously produced by some process, or very large models are fragmented and fed into the transformation engine. This poses a series of issues that cannot be tackled using current transformation engines. In this paper we motivate the applicability of this kind of transformations, explore the elements involved, and review several strategies to deal with them. We also propose a concrete approach, built on top of the Eclectic transformation tool., This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (project “Go Lite” TIN2011-24139) and the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (project “e-Madrid” S2009/TIC-1650)

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36089-3_7, Revised Selected Papers of 5th International Conference, SLE 2012, Dresden, Germany, September 26-28, 2012, The increasing application of Model-Driven Engineering in a wide range of domains, in addition to pure code generation, raises the need to manipulate models at runtime, as part of regular programs. Moreover, certain kinds of programming tasks can be seen as model transformation tasks, and thus we could take advantage of model transformation technology in order to facilitate them. In this paper we report on our works to bridge the gap between regular programming and model transformation by enabling the manipulation of Java APIs as models. Our approach is based on the specification of a mapping between a Java API (e.g., Swing) and a meta-model describing it. A model transformation definition is written against the API meta-model and we have built a compiler that generates the corresponding Java bytecode according to the mapping. We present several application scenarios and discuss the mapping between object-oriented meta-modelling and the Java object system. Our proposal has been validated by a prototype implementation which is also contributed., Work funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2011-24139), and the R&D programme of Madrid Region (S2009/TIC-1650).

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40840-3_16, Proceedings of 10th International Conference, CDVE 2013, Alcudia, Mallorca, Spain, September 22-25, 2013, Domain-Specific Modelling Languages (DSMLs) are high-level languages specially designed to perform tasks in a particular domain. When developing DSMLs, the participation of end-users is normally limited to providing domain knowledge and testing the resulting language prototypes. Language developers, which are perhaps not domain experts, are therefore in control of the language development and evolution. This may cause misinterpretations which hamper the development process and the quality of the DSML. Thus, it would be beneficial to promote a more active participation of end-users in the development process of DSMLs. While current DSML workbenches are mono-user and designed for technical experts, we present a process and tool support for the example-driven, collaborative construction of DSMLs in order to engage end-users in the creation of their own languages., This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (project “Go Lite” TIN2011-24139), the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (project “e-Madrid” S2009/TIC-1650) and the European Commission under the ICT Policy Support Programme, grant no. 317859.

This paper presents a solution for the Flow Graphs case of the Transformation Tool Contest 2013, using the Eclectic model transformation tool. The solution makes use of several languages of Eclectic, showing how it is possible to combine them to address a non-trivial transformation problem in a concise and modulary way., In Proceedings TTC 2013, arXiv:1311.7536

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39013-5_13, Proceedings of 9th European Conference, ECMFA 2013, Montpellier, France, July 1-5, 2013, Almira Labs is a software company that develops value-added services for the telecommunications industry. It is focused on innovative technologies that enable enterprise business and mobile and landline operators to offer next-generation voice-driven applications for all types of phones. Telephony services are built atop the proprietary Umbra framework, which is a Java API relying on the JAIN SLEE standard for event-based communication applications. This paper describes Umbra Designer, a novel graphical modelling tool for the visual development of telephony services, from which Java code for the Umbra framework is synthesized. In this way, it is easy to develop ready-to-use services, even by users not familiar with the Java API or the JAIN SLEE standard. We also report on some experiments aimed at measuring the efficiency gain derived from using the graphical tool, compared with coding directly using the Java API., This work was partially funded by the Innocash program and the project “Go Lite” TIN2011-24139 of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity. The work was also funded by the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (project “e-Madrid” S2009/TIC-1650)

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09195-2-13, Proceedings of 10th European Conference, ECMFA 2014, Held as Part of STAF 2014, York, UK, July 21-25, 2014, General-purpose transformation languages, like ATL or QVT, are the basis for model manipulation in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). However, as MDE moves to more complex scenarios, there is the need for specialized transformation languages for activities like model merging, migration or aspect weaving, or for specific domains of wide use like UML. Such domain-specific transformation languages (DSTLs) encapsulate transformation knowledge within a language, enabling the reuse of recurrent solutions to transformation problems. Nowadays, many DSTLs are built in an ad-hoc manner, which requires a high development cost to achieve a full-featured implementation. Alternatively, they are realised by an embedding into general-purpose transformation or programming languages like ATL or Java. In this paper, we propose a framework for the systematic creation of DSTLs. First, we look into the characteristics of domain-specific transformation tools, deriving a categorization which is the basis of our framework. Then, we propose a domain-specific language to describe DSTLs, from which we derive a ready-to-run workbench which includes the abstract syntax, concrete syntax and translational semantics of the DSTL., This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with project “Go Lite” (TIN2011-24139)

Also published online by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073), Achieving scalability in modelling and MDE involves being able to construct large models and domain-speci c languages in a systematic manner, enabling teams of modellers to construct and re ne large models in collaboration, advancing the state of the art in model querying and transformations tools so that they can cope with large models (of the scale of millions of model elements), and providing an infrastructure for e cient storage, indexing and retrieval of large models. This paper outlines how MONDO, a collaborative EC-funded project, has contributed to tackling some of these scalability-related challenges.

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08789-4_14, Proceedings of 7th International Conference, ICMT 2014, Held as Part of STAF 2014, York, UK, July 21-22, 2014, Reuse techniques are key for the industrial adoption of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). However, while reusability has been successfully applied to programming languages, its use is scarce in MDE and, in particular, in model transformations. In previous works, we developed an approach that enables the reuse of model transformations for different meta-models. This is achieved by defining reusable components that encapsulate a generic transformation template and expose an interface called concept declaring the structural requirements that any meta-model using the component should fulfil. Binding the concept to one of such meta-models induces an adaptation of the template, which becomes applicable to the meta-model. To facilitate reuse, concepts need to be concise, reflecting only the minimal set of requirements demanded by the transformation. In this paper, we automate the reverse engineering of existing transformations into reusable transformation components. To make a transformation reusable, we use the information obtained from its static analysis to derive a concept that is minimal with respect to the transformation and maximizes its reuse opportunities, and then evolve the transformation accordingly. The paper describes a prototype implementation and an evaluation using transformations from the ATL zoo., This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with project “Go Lite” (TIN2011-24139)