Grand Challenges in Model-Driven Engineering?

1. Grand Challenges in Model-Driven Engineering? Richard Paige paige@cs.york.ac.uk High-Integrity Systems Engineering Group Department of Computer Science The University of York, UK

2. Grand Challenges • UKCRC and DARPA are currently funding a number of Grand Challenge projects. • A grand challenge should have international scope. • The ambition of a grand challenge should be far greater than what can be achieved by a single research team • in the span of a single research project. • A grand challenge should be directed towards a revolutionary advance. • The topic for a grand challenge should emerge from a consensus of the general scientific community • Is the time ripe for Grand Challenges in MDE?

3. Challenges in MDE • Do we yet have grand challenges in MDE? • What are some of the challenges at the moment? • They might help us develop/derive grand challenges. • Some ideas: • MDE on an industrial scale. • Dynamic engineering processes. • Complex system semantics.

4. MDE on an industrial scale • In our company we have huge models, of the order of tens of thousands of model elements. Can your tool/language support huge models? • I would like to use model transformation. Can your tool/language support huge models with performance guarantees? • In my company we have many developers and each manages only a specific part of the model. Can your tool/language/modelling infrastructure handle such distributed development?

5. Example – UK National Health Service

6. Example – UK National Health Service The IT infrastructure being developed by the NHS is large and complex (and controversial). Some important parts: The electronic care record (“Spine”) “Choose & Book” for patients Demographics database Electronic Prescriptions Service N3, the networking facilities Security broker ... Slide 6

7. Overall Picture Slide 7

8. Scale and Performance • Transformations and models everywhere. • Currently hand-crafted XSLT and big XML files. • Needs to handle 18,000+ nodes generating output constantly. • The generated models are heterogeneous. • The metamodels are changing, normally in fine-grained ways, but sometimes there are large changes. • e.g., new allergy attributes. • Can our current modelling languages and model transformation frameworks support this? • The XSLT is enormously complicated and brittle!

9. Dynamic Processes Some engineering processes are highly dynamic. Example: large-scale aerospace project. Traceability information can be added afterwards Can our MDE tools support addition of traceability information post facto, while still supporting normal scenarios of use (like M2M)? Slide 9

10. Riots Individuals have behaviour. Small groups have different behaviour (which changes the behaviour of individuals) dependent on local context. A large group has different behaviour that is not predictable from small group and individual behaviour. Can we model complex individual, local group, and large group behaviour, including the interactions between semantics of individuals and groups? Slide 10

11. Grand Challenges Grand challenges are motivated primarily by scientific curiosity about the ultimate scope and limitations of computers. Also by engineering ambition to construct something that has never been built before. Are we at a level of maturity in MDE to set such challenges? Slide 11

12. Debate ? ? ? ? ?