I’m coorganizing MELO 2016, a workshop co-located with STAF 2016 (Vienna, July 4th).

The main goal of this workshop is to bring together three different communities: the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) community, the logic programming community, and the optimization community, to explore how each community can benefit from the techniques of the other. The workshop will develop bridges and synergies between these communities, and will provide a forum for researchers to discuss new or ongoing projects, and develop new collaborations.

I believe this can be a very interesting event and I hope that many of you decide to join us!. Full details below (or in the worskhop web site). You can also download a pdf version of the call for papers.

Objectives and Scope

The main goal of this workshop is to bring together three different communities: the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) community, the logic programming community, and the optimization community, to explore how each community can benefit from the techniques of the other. The workshop will develop bridges and synergies between these communities, and will provide a forum for researchers to discuss new or ongoing projects, and develop new collaborations.

The widespread application of MDE in all kinds of domains (e.g. critical systems, software product lines, embedded systems,…) has triggered the need of new techniques to solve optimization, visualization, verification, configuration,… problems at the model level. Instead of reinventing the wheel, most of these problems could be solved by reexpressing the modeling problem as a logic programming problem or as an optimization or search problem. As an example, verification (satisfiability) of large static models can be addressed by re-expressing the model as a constraint satisfaction problem to be solved by state-of-the-art constraint solvers.

Similarly, logic programming can benefit from the integration of MDE principles. As in any other domain, introduction of MDE would help to raise the abstraction level at which the problem is described (e.g. by providing domain-specific languages that allow non-technical users to specify the problem using a vocabulary closer to the domain), improve the separation of concerns by using different model-based views of the problem at different levels of detail, achieve tool independence (e.g. by following a typical Platform Independent Model – Platform Specific Model separation where, for instance, at the Platform Independent Model level we could define tool-independent logic programming metamodels), increase reusability.

As well, optimization techniques can benefit from closer connections to MDE principles, e.g., to help develop generic solutions to optimization problems (e.g., standardized representations of optimization problems, benchmarks).

We believe the workshop will attract researchers and practitioners in all the above areas.

The workshop will focus on presentation of ongoing work at the intersection of at least two of the areas noted above (e.g., MDE + logic programming, MDE + optimization). The workshop will accept work in progress, preliminary experimental results, position papers and challenge problems (precisely and concisely stated – these may in turn lead to the development of benchmarks).

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Modeling and generation of constraint problems,
  • Interoperability between constraint technical spaces,
  • Constraint metamodels,
  • Constraint Independent Model-Platform Independent Model-Platform Specific Model for Constraint Logic Programming,
  • Domain Specific Languages for Constraint Logic Programming,
  • Semantics of Business Vocabularies & Business Rules (SBVR),
  • Business Process Modeling Notation(BPMN),
  • MDE in satisfaction and planning problems,
  • Model Checking,
  • Model Optimization,
  • Using Constraint Programming or Operational Research to compute Software Product Line solutions,
  • Using MDE to represent Software Product Line problems and solutions,
  • Comparing combination of MDE and Constraint Programming/Operational Research for Software Product Line.
  • Combining Modeling and Search-Based Software Engineering
  • Generic representations of models amenable to search
  • Generic implementations of search-based algorithms applicable to models
  • Novel reformulations of modeling problems as search problems
  • Case studies/Experiments in combining modeling, logic programming and search

 

Intended audience

Researchers and practitioners working in MDE, optimization or logic programming with an interest in synergies between techniques, who value a forum to present work in progress and preliminary results.

 

Important Dates

  • paper submission: April 18th, 2016
  • notification: May 25th, 2016
  • workshop dates: 4 July, 2016

 

 

Workshop Format

We anticipate having 30 minute presentations for all accepted papers (including 5 to 10 discussion time), as well as a working session in the afternoon where a challenge problem is identified for participants to collaborate on, e.g., to test out their tools, techniques, ideas, models on a specific problem. The workshop organisers will prepare a challenge problem in the situation where inadequate problems are submitted by community members.

 

Selection Process

Papers will be lightly peer reviewed for appropriateness/fit to the workshop, likelihood of leading to quality discussion, and overall soundness. We anticipate publishing draft papers on the MELO’16 website.

Our main goal is to estimulate interesting discussions and create connections among people from the different communities.

 

Submission Format

We solicit several types of papers:

  • Full research papers of up to 12 pages
  • Work-in-progress papers of up to 6 pages
  • Position papers of up to 6 pages
  • Challenge problem papers (stating a technical problem relevant to the workshop) of up to 6 pages

Paper submissions can be made only electronically via the EasyChair submission web page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=melo2016

All submissions must be original work, be prepared using the LNCS template, and must not have been previously published, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere. At least one author of each accepted paper should register for the event and participate fully in the workshop.

 

Publication of Accepted Papers

Accepted papers will be part of the STAF 2016 general workshop publication plans, which includes a joint publications of all proceedings in a LNCS volume (for all papers with 6 pages or more) and online publication before the event in the workshop website for all papers.

 

Organizers and primary contacts (name/affiliation/email):

Jordi Cabot (ICREA, [email protected])

Richard Paige (University of York, [email protected])

Alfonso Pierantonio (University of L’Aquila, [email protected])

 

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