Karpfen: A Lightweight Modeling- and Model Execution Toolkit for Education and Prototyping

A central objective of a model-driven software engineering process is to model a system with sufficient depth to make it executable. While for industrial applications, such processes are complex and rarely adopted, they play to their strengths in education. Modeling a system step by step until it becomes executable, monitoring the system in action, and then going back to adjust the models drives the learner’s understanding of model-driven engineering and system design. However, when beginners are tasked with extensive modeling, they quickly become challenged and frustrated without ideal tooling. This work presents the Karpfen toolkit, an open-source modeling and execution toolkit comprising lightweight languages for domain-, data-, and behavior modeling. The strength of the Karpfen toolkit lies in the combination of a state-of-the-art technical stack, a highly instrumented model execution system, and minimal technical requirements for users. This paper presents the requirements-driven design of the Karpfen toolkit and demonstrates it in two case studies.