Nico Jansen

When applying model-driven engineering in an agile environment, new requirements continuously expand the domain scope and trigger an extension of the concepts covered by the Domain-Specific Language (DSL). While programming languages streamline code extension and reuse through libraries, similar approaches for DSLs are more complex or target a specific language. We present and discuss an approach for designing DSLs with a self-extension mechanism to enable model library creation and seamless reuse. We use the self-extension mechanism to introduce concepts in models, gather reusable models into a library, and provide an infrastructure for its usage. We explain our language-specific realization of the self-extension mechanism using a DSL and discuss model libraries of the DSL with a use case from practice. The approach provides more flexibility for agile model-driven engineering. It enables application modelers to introduce and reuse concepts via models without changing the DSL, reducing the communication overhead within the development team.

The composition of different source artifacts is a fundamental mechanism for modularization and reuse in many software languages and essential for separating distinct concerns and building reference-able libraries. This form of composition relies on importing foreign artifacts, i.e., including code, models, and concepts. Although importing artifacts is a concept found frequently in software languages, especially programming languages, there are different ways of doing so. Current realizations are highly verbose, and there is no uniform application concept for imports within the modeling discipline. In this paper, we analyze different approaches to realizing imports for software languages and identify their advantages and drawbacks. Based on this information, we elaborate on the beneficial features of different modeling circumstances. This collection supports future import realizations for languages by guiding the selection of the correct technique concerning different goals and corresponding features.

The work stream CRD-C.I of the Cluster of Excellence Internet of Production focuses on the topic of agile product development in order to enable reduced lead-times as well as exceeded customer and user satisfaction in product development. The main emphasis of the research lies on the associated processes and structures. In the course of the first 3 years of the Internet of Production, answers to relevant research questions of agile product development were developed within and between the research areas of market development, organization, data and engineering as well as production of prototypes. This chapter presents selected focus areas and insights from these research areas.

Time-to-market and continuous improvement are key success indicators to deliver for Industry 4.0 Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). There is thus a growing interest in adapting DevOps approaches coming from software systems to CPSs. However, CPSs are made not only of software but also of physical parts that need to be monitored at runtime. In this paper, we claim that Model-Driven Engineering can facilitate DevOps for CPSs by automatically connecting a CPS design model to its runtime monitoring, in the form of a digital twin.