Topics of interest

The workshop defines an MDE tool to be a tool that provides support for the creation and/or use of models for some significant development tasks (involving, e.g., creation, manipulation, transformation, evolution, communication, generation, execution, testing, simulation, or analysis) and that offers benefit to the user through the effective use of some or all of the three core principles behind MDE: abstraction, automation, and analysis. Tools can come from industry or academia and be freely available, open source, or commercial.

MDETools’18 welcomes submissions on aspects related to the development and use of such tools and their supporting materials. MDETools’18 is particularly interested in the following topics:

1. Convincing, insightful descriptions of the state-of-theart in MDE tooling, in general and in the context of the workshop challenge problem.
2. Criteria and approaches for objective, repeatable tool evaluations and comparisons.
3. Proposals for dealing with relevant tooling challenges such as integration, interoperability, and usability, in general or in the context of new or emerging applications (such as the ‘digital twin’ and ‘digital thread’ concepts), and application domains (such as the systems engineering, Industry 4.0, and the Internet of Things).
4. Proposals on how to better leverage relevant standards and community efforts (such as Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC), Microsoft’s Language Server Protocol, the Eclipse ecosystem and open source tools in general).
5. Proposals for facilitating the creation, maintenance and dissemination of high-quality tools and materials.
6. Techniques and tools for the creation of attractive documentation material, in general and in the context of the video tutorial track.

Submissions

Categories

Submissions should fall into one of the following categories:

1. Research papers: describe new and innovative ways how MDE tools and their development can be improved; papers addressing relevant challenges, trends, and opportunities (see ‘Topics of Interest’) are particularly encouraged.
2. Comparisons and evaluations of MDE tools: describe the tools compared or evaluated, criteria and data collection processes used, and results obtained in a novel, insightful way; models used and data collected should be made publicly available. Descriptions of novel ways to encourage or facilitate evaluations and comparisons are also welcome.
3. Position papers: clearly describe a position or opinion on a relevant topic (see ‘Topics of Interest’) in an insightful way; papers discussing challenges to the development of high-quality MDE tools and supporting documentation and how they could be mitigated or removed are particularly encouraged.
4. Descriptions of MDE tool use in context of the challenge problem: describe (1) how significant aspects of the challenge problem have been addressed with the help of an MDE tool or tools, and (2) the strengths and weaknesses of the tool in the context of the problem. All created models must be made public and information about how they can be obtained must be provided.
5. Video tutorials: demonstrate the use of an MDE tool for a particular task (or set of tasks) in an informative, accurate, attractive, and polished way. Submissions should be accompanied by a short summary containing (1) a description of the contents of the tutorial including the tool and task(s) chosen, and (2) a URL of the web location where the tutorial can be accessed and viewed. Guidelines for submitting video tutorials are available here .

EasyChair will be used to handle the submissions of papers in Categories I to IV and of summaries of video tutorials. The submission link is: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mdetools18.

Format and size limits

All submitted artifacts must use English. All textual documents must adhere to the Springer LNCS formatting guidelines. Research papers (Category I), comparisons and evaluations of MDE tools (Category II), position papers (Category III), and descriptions of tool use in the context of the challenge problem (Category IV), should be between 6 and 10 pages in length. Video tutorials should not be longer than 10 minutes; the accompanying summary should not exceed 2 pages.

Publication

Accepted papers and summaries of accepted video tutorials will be published in the workshop proceedings which will be made available using the openaccess publication service CEUR ceur-ws.org.

Evaluation process and criteria

The submission and reviewing process will be handled using EasyChair. All submissions will be reviewed by at least three PC members. Acceptance decisions will be made based on standard criteria such as correctness, clarity, and originality, but also on the potential of the work to stimulate discussion, inspire participants, and contribute to the success of the workshop. Moreover, video tutorials should convey knowledge about how to use an MDE tool for a particular task or set of tasks in an accurate, clear, succinct, and easy-to-follow way; chosen tasks should be non-trivial and relevant to potential users; the tutorial should be attractive and polished and use the tutorial format effectively. Submissions with workshop organizers as (co-)authors will be allowed, but care will be taken to enforce the standard conflict rules when assigning papers for review, collecting reviews, and discussing submissions.