A programming language view to model-driven engineering

Abstract

MDE provides an appealing framework for supporting engineering activities, from early design phases to acceptance tests; going through refinement, architectural and functional design down to code generation and V&V efforts. Yet, separation of concerns between system engineers, architects and embedded domain experts may badly interact. by lack of a exchange mechanisms at both syntactic and semantic levels. Pivot meta-models also demonstrated their limits. In this talk, I'll illustrate on various projects how the use of a text-based modeling notation, combined with a strong semantics inherited from typical object-oriented languages, can support seamless integration of most concerns of a traditional V cycle, thus solving many issues in MDE approaches. I'll base my presentation on present current discussions part of the AADL standardization committee to enrich Architecture Description Language with a Constraint language. The objective is to increase the coupling between modeling and verification. By making the verification part of extended semantics rules of an ADL, we control the patterns used to describe the system, ensuring designers respect requirements, but also integrate V&V as part of the modeling effort.