SEMINARIOS DE DOCTORADO 2004-2005
Doctorado en Ingeniería
Informática y de
Telecomunicación
Escuela Politécnica Superior, Universidad Autónoma de
Madrid
26 de Mayo de 2005, 12:00
Salón de Grados, Escuela Politécnica Superior,
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Domain-specific Modelling:
Meta-modelling and Model Transformation
Hans Vangheluwe
School of Computer
Science, McGill University (Montreal, Canadá)
Resumen/Abstract
The complexity of systems we study and build keeps increasing at
a phenomenal rate. To cope with this complexity, a "model-oriented" viewpoint is
suggested. Engineering (design) and Science (analysis) invariably use
models to describe structure as well as behaviour of systems. Models
may have components described in different formalisms, and may span
different levels of abstraction. In addition, model transformation is
often used to transform models into a domain/formalism where certain
questions can be easily answered. More in particular, the virtues of
domain-specific modelling (of physical as well as of software systems)
will be demonstrated by means of an example: the modelling, analysis,
simulation, and eventual synthesis of software components for Traffic
networks.
Using domain-specific modelling environments maximally constrains
users, allowing them, by construction, to only build syntactically and
(for as far as this can be statically checked) semantically correct
models. Furthermore, the domain-specific, often visual syntax used
matches the users' mental model of the problem domain. The time
required to construct domain/formalism-specific modelling and
simulation environments can be prohibitive. Thus, rather than using
such specific environments, generic environments are typically used.
Such generic environments are necessarily a compromise. In this
presentation it will be shown how meta-modelling and model
transformation enable the efficient construction of domain-specific
modelling environments.
In meta-modelling, one explicitly models the syntax of modelling
formalisms. This simplifies the construction of domain-specific
formalisms (by slightly modifying existing meta-models). Above all, an
appropriate meta-modelling tool will support synthesis of a
domain-specific (visual) modelling tool from the meta-model.
Model transformations are important: to describe operational
semantics of formalisms, to answer certain questions by transforming
models into an appropriate formalism, to optimize the model with
respect
to some performance metric while preserving some properties,
... As at some level of abstraction, all models are graphs, one
general way of explicitly modelling transformations is to use graph
grammars.
Furthermore, graph grammar models are an executable
specification.
presentación PDF
presentation
Hans Vangheluwe
Hans Vangheluwe is a Professor in the School
of Computer Science at McGill
University, Montrèal, Canada. He holds a D.Sc. degree, as
well as an M.Sc. in Computer Science, and B.Sc. degrees in Theoretical
Physics and Education, all from Ghent University in Belgium. He has
been a Research Fellow at the Centre de Recherche Informatique de
Montrèal, Canada, the Concurrent Engineering Research Center,
WVU, Morgantown, WV, USA, at the Delft University of Technology, The
Netherlands, and at the Supercomputing and Education Research Center of
the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India.
At McGill University, he teaches Modelling and Simulation, as well as
Software Design. He also heads the Modelling
and Simulation and Design (MSDL) research lab. He has been the
Principal Investigator of a number of research projects focused on the
development of a multi-formalism theory for Modelling and
Simulation. Some of this work has led to the WEST++ tool, which was
commercialised for use in the design and optimization of bioactivated
sludge Waste Water Treatment Plants. He was the co-founder and
coordinator of the European Union's ESPRIT Basic Research Working Group
8467 ``Simulation in Europe'', a founding member of the Modelica Design
Team, and an advisor to the Flemish Institute for the Promotion of
Scientific-Technological Research in Industry (IWT), as well as to the
European Commission's 5th Framework programme. He is an Associate
Editor for the journal Simulation: Transactions of the Society for
Modeling and Computer Simulation. His current interests are in
domain-specific modelling and simulation. The MSDL's tool AToM3
(A Tool for Multi-formalism and Meta-Modelling) developed in
collaboration with Dr. Juan de Lara uses meta-modelling and graph
grammars to specify and generate domain-specific environments.