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Most Influential 10 Year Theme Section Paper 2019

At this year's International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, held in Munich, Germany, September 15-20, 2019, the paper Generating instance models from meta models by Karsten Ehrig, Jochen Malte Küster, and Gabriele Taentzer (University of Leicester, IBM Zurich, Philipps-Universität Marburg) has been named Most Influential 10 Year Theme Section Paper of the journal Software and System Modeling.

In software engineering, there are many different languages to create artifacts important for software development. In addition to various programming languages such as C and Java, there are modeling languages such as the Unified Modeling Language and the Business Process Modeling Notation, and other languages for exchanging data in Json or documenting software in HTML, for example. While a programming language is defined with the help of a grammar, metamodels are used to define modeling languages, especially visual languages. These define languages declaratively, so that the generation of instance models is not directly possible. Grammars, on the other hand, are constructive and are therefore suitable for generating instances. The awarded work shows how a grammar can be derived from a metamodel that defines the same language. The concept of automatic instance generation from a metamodel is used in many ways, e.g., to test model transformations, to optimize models, or to better understand model differences. In the last 10 years, the theoretical results have been put into practice and have been used in particular for the improved development of long-lived software within the DFG priority program Design For Future - Managed Software Evolution.