Textual modeling languages are used in model-driven engineering for a variety of purposes. Among the most important purposes are querying a model and formulating restrictions like state invariants or operation preand postconditions. This paper compares three such languages. OCL augments UML as a precise language that provides constraint and object query expressions that cannot otherwise be expressed by a diagrammatic notation. Alloy is a simple but expressive logic based on the notion of relations. FOML is a logic rule language that supports object modeling, analysis, and inference. The paper shows typical models in each of the three languages and discusses similarities of and differences between the languages.

Many of today’s partially or fully automated medical research systems are rule, or constraint-driven systems that must be analyzed with respect to their rule compliance. We propose a new method called Multi Modeling Constraint-Driven System Analysis to explore and analyze rule conformance in these systems. Specifically, our method takes advantage of existing system documentation in the form of operational flow charts, and refines and transforms the information in them to into more formal system representations that allow automated analysis and reasoning, including reasoning about rule conformance. The method uses UML, Alloy, and protocol state machine models, and includes trace linking between informal and formal diagram and model elements, to allow analysis reporting on more informal diagrams and also ‘what if’ exploration to address atypical settings or problems found during analysis. Sometimes models are large and not amenable to automated analysis so we demonstrate how slicing techniques can be used to extract subset models relevant to particular analyses. We demonstrate our method using an existing medical research system.

ContextIt is challenging to develop comprehensive, consistent, analyzable requirements models for evolving requirements. This is particularly critical for certain highly interactive types of socio-technical systems that involve a wide range of stakeholders with disparate backgrounds; system success is often dependent on how well local social constraints are addressed in system design.ObjectiveThis paper describes feasibility research, combining a holistic social system perspective provided by Activity Theory (AT), a psychological paradigm, with existing system development methodologies and tools, specifically goal and scenario modeling.MethodAT is used to understand the relationships between a system, its stakeholders, and the system’s evolving context. The User Requirements Notation (URN) is used to produce rigorous, analyzable specifications combining goal and scenario models. First, an AT language was developed constraining the framework for automation, second consistency heuristics were developed for constructing and analyzing combined AT/URN models, third a combined AT/URN methodology was developed, and consequently applied to a proof-of-concept system.ResultsAn AT language with limited tool support was developed, as was a combined AT/URN methodology. This methodology was applied to an evolving disease management system to demonstrate the feasibility of adapting AT for use in system development with existing methodologies and tools. Bi-directional transformations between the languages allow proposed changes in system design to be propagated to AT models for use in stakeholder discussions regarding system evolution.ConclusionsThe AT framework can be constrained for use in requirements elicitation and combined with URN tools to provide system designs that include social system perspectives. The developed AT/URN methodology can help engineers to track the impact on system design due to requirement changes triggered by changes in the system’s social context. The methodology also allows engineers to assess the impact of proposed system design changes on the social elements of the system context.

Robert was a co-founder of SoSyM and served as its Editor-in-Chiefsinceitsinceptionin1999.Hepassionatelybelievedthat the modeling community needed their own journal to beabletoreadandpublishinnovationsintheareasofmodeling,modellanguages,useofmodels,tooling,etc.Throughoutthepast 16years, Robert has been a major driving force behindthis journal. We dedicate this editorial to his memory.

SoSyM continues to experience a high number of submissions.In 2014, 295 manuscripts were submitted, of which 69 % were reviewed for regular issues, while the other 31 % were submitted for special or theme sections or the industry voice column.The average number of days from submission to a final decision (that is, a final accept or reject) was 221 days.It should be noted that this time includes the time authors spend on making major and subsequent minor revisions (typically 4-5 months).The number of weeks to online publication of an accepted paper is between 3 and 4 weeks.To better manage the screening of this high number of submissions, we have introduced three associate Editors-in-Chief, namely Marsha Chechik, Martin Gogolla, and Jean-Marc Jezequel.They are primarily

Executive Summary:† 213 days from submission to final accept or reject. Thisshould be better.† As the backlog became too large, we do two things:SoSyM permanently increases the number of papers perissue from 192 to 224 pages (+32 pages) and we almostdouble(!)thenumberofpagesfor2014to448pages(issue1 and 2) and 304 pages (issue 3 and 4).† Impact factor SCI: 1.250 (previous: 1,061). This is anincrease of 17.8%.† New domains of modeling, like CPS, modeling big data,scientific models, or models of the world are not yetpresent enough.† In overall SoSyM is doing very well.SoSyM continues to experience an increasing number ofsubmissions. In 2013, 245 manuscripts were submitted, ofwhich67%werereviewedforregularissues,whiletheother33% were submitted for special or theme sections or indus-try voice. The average number of days from initial submis-sion to a final decision (that is, a final accept or reject) was213 days. It should be noted that this time includes the time

During the panel session at the OCL workshop, the OCL community discussed, stimulated by short presentations by OCL experts, potential future extensions and improvements of the OCL. As such, this panel discussion continued the discussion that started at the OCL meeting in Aachen in 2013 and on which we reported in the proceedings of the last year's OCL workshop.This collaborative paper, to which each OCL expert contributed one section, summarises the panel discussion as well as describes the suggestions for further improvements in more detail.

Society has become more and more dependent on critical infrastructures and the embedded computing systems that control them. The dependability of these critical systems, including requirements related to reliability, safety, and security, is of utmost importance and requires specific attention in all phases of the system lifecycle. These systems have traditionally been under strict control of the organization delivering and owning them and their continuous, predictable operation has been closely monitored and maintained. However, critical systems are increasingly connected to the Internet, to peer and vendor sites, or to regulatory bodies and their management and control is often outsourced. The notions of both a system and an organization are more diffuse as critical systems move towards cross-organizational and distributed control structures. No longer is one single organization in control of these systems, rather their dependability may now be affected by operations performed by a third party and security and trust becomes increasingly important and complex. This Risk and Trust in Embedded Critical Systems special issue of TECS focuses on some of the main security challenges facing embedded computing systems design and implementation. The articles in this special issue focus on design and implementation of trusted embedded systems. The first article, “Designing Trusted Embedded Systems from Finite State Machines” by Carson Dunbar and Gang Qu, presents an approach to addressing security and trust issues in sequential design using finite state machines. In the second article, “Combating Software and Sybil Attacks to Data Integrity in CrowdSourced Embedded Systems” by Dua et al., the authors investigate how a trusted sensing peripheral, consisting of a trusted platform module and sensors, can help defend crowd-sourced mobile embedded systems against attacks on data integrity.

We have developed a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for requirements elicitation that is based on the psychological framework of Activity Theory (AT). AT emphasizes the social context in which human activity takes place, and thus is useful to systematically develop models of social contexts, validate these contexts with stakeholders, and identify potential sources of system evolution based on identified changing social constraints. AT holds potential as a requirements elicitation tool for complex human interactive systems with a diverse set of stakeholders that do not have common goals. Our adaptation of AT for use in software engineering has evolved over time as we have used it in a case study and developed limited tools that can support designers both during initial system design and during system evolution. Here we describe how the USE tool was applied to develop the DSL and how we have used this tool to create instances of AT models and analyze them for structural constraint inconsistencies. We identify some of the issues encountered in this process and some of the remaining open issues regarding a USE model as an implementation of our DSL.

The Sparse Polyhedral Framework (SPF) extends the Polyhedral Model by using the uninterpreted function call abstraction for the compile-time specification of run-time reordering transformations such as loop and data reordering and sparse tiling approaches that schedule irregular sets of iteration across loops. The Polyhedral Model represents sets of iteration points in imperfectly nested loops with unions of polyhedral and represents loop transformations with affine functions applied to such polyhedra sets. Existing tools such as ISL, Cloog, and Omega manipulate polyhedral sets and affine functions, however the ability to represent the sets and functions where some of the constraints include uninterpreted function calls such as those needed in the SPF is non-existant or severely restricted. This paper presents algorithms for manipulating sets and relations with uninterpreted function symbols to enable the Sparse Polyhedral Framework. The algorithms have been implemented in an open source, C++ library called IEGenLib (The Inspector/Executor Generator Library).

We have seen many efforts invested in research on engineering security aspects of software and systems over the last years, but we have also seen spectacular security breaches and privacy leaks in web applications, mobile apps, and enterprise systems. In fact, in both the industrial and the academic context, we are still far from satisfactory, integrative development approaches covering the many different facets of security, such as access control, secure user interaction, privacy, secure protocols, trustworthiness, etc. Model-driven and model-based approaches to security integrate security aspects in the early phases of software development at an abstract level. They thus pave the way to reduce the gap between security requirements and their enforcement mechanisms and to verify security properties on an appropriate level of detail, following the principle of separation of concerns. These approaches allow designers to decouple functional architecture from mechanisms that ensure the security properties of the system. The main objective of this workshop was to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the approaches, key issues, innovative applications, and trends in model-driven engineering of secure and trustworthy service composition, software, and systems.

Modeling approaches are based on various paradigms, e.g., aspect-oriented, feature-oriented, object-oriented, and logic-based. Modeling approaches may cover requirements models to low-level design models, are developed for various purposes, use various means of composition, and thus are difficult to compare. However, such comparisons are critical to help practitioners know under which conditions approaches are most applicable, and how they might be successfully generalized and combined to achieve end-to-end methods. This paper reports on work done at the 2nd International Comparing Modeling Approaches (CMA) workshop towards the goal of identifying potential comprehensive modeling methodologies with a particular emphasis on composition: (i) an improved set of comparison criteria; (ii) 19 assessments of modeling approaches based on the comparison criteria and a common, focused case study.

This paper provides a summary of the First International Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering for High Performance and CLoud computing (MDHPCL) held as a satellite event of the ACM/IEEE 15th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS) that took place in Innsbruck, Austria on October 2, 2012.