OpenMBEE at MODELS 2020

Workshop on Open Model Based Engineering Environment (OpenMBEE)



OpenMBEE, the First International Workshop on Open Model Based Engineering Environment is organized as part of the IEEE/ACM 23nd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2020) in Montreal, Canada.

OpenMBEE will take place on Mon October 19 2020 aiming at defining the future directions of this area by bringing together world experts for an intense half-day workshop.

The Open Model Based Engineering Environment (OpenMBEE) group is a community of engineering practitioners, software developers, and researchers that share a common vision for a world where engineering modeling relies on a rich open source set of models and software that support engineering modeling and analysis in the form of an integrated environment.

This environment shall enable collaborative modeling at scale and be an open platform for (system) engineering tools. It is also expected to support conventions and practices that will support cultivating a culture of collaborative engineering model development to transform the currently often siloed engineering practice.

Using software development as a guide, we expect engineering modeling will leverage many of those capabilities and practices with additional novelty germane to the world of engineering modeling and analysis. As in most organizations documents are the primary publishing mechanism for engineering work based on models, the environment is expected to enable mutually consistent and corresponding engineering models and documents achieving the single source of authority.

The OpenMBEE community strives to develop capabilities that help organizations better define and manage their MBX (Model Based X) ecosystems. MBX ecosystems consist of the models, tools, processes, and people/roles that come together to develop the systems/products that an organization cares about. The MBEE capabilities and tooling scope for this workshop is not restricted to the currently available items, although it is encouraged to leverage them.

In terms of technology, some developments appear of particular interest to the OpenMBEE community, including SysMLv2, Jupyter, and Python.

SysMLv2 is emerging into the multi-language paradigm together with Project Jupyter as a popular polyglot engineering platform for analytical and computational models. Similarly, in the Jupyter and Python space there is a desire to see broader modeling capabilities in these general purpose languages. They are envisaged to play a major role in the near future as key enabling technologies for MBx ecosystems.

The goal is to contribute techniques and tools supporting all aspects of development, use, maintenance and evolution of OpenMBEE-relevant artifacts, and make these available to the the OpenMBEE community to allow them to collaboratively construct and analyze the high-quality products needed to develop missions and systems.

All questions about submissions should be emailed to openmbee.models2020 (at) gmail.com

OpenMBEE is a half-day workshop held as part of MODELS 2020. The OpenMBEE Workshop aims to share

  1. experiences of developing and operating Model-Based Engineering Environ-ments (MBEEs)
  2. how new and existing technologies support MBEEs
  3. how SysMLv2 emerging into the multi-language paradigm and API standard drives MBEEs
  4. challenges and requirements of MBEEs
  5. Human-Centered Design approaches to improve usability and effectiveness of MBEEs

A primary objective of the OpenMBEE workshop is to provide a forum in which researchers, vendors, and practitioners come together and share requirements, needs, pain points, and solutions.

The workshop will be highly interactive to achieve this goal. A significant portion of the workshop’s time is reserved for focused discussions.

Assuming a sufficient number of high-quality submissions are received, OpenMBEE’20 is envisioned to be a workshop consisting of:

  • One keynote
  • One invited presentation on a topic related to the workshop by suitable speakers from academia or industry.
  • “lightning talks” on a topic related to OpenMBEE that will jump-start the discussions

A primary objective of the OpenMBEE workshop is to provide a forum in which researchers, vendors, and practitioners come together and share requirements, needs, pain points, and solutions. In order to discuss the following topics and those related to them, we would like to invite submissions in the form of regular papers, position/experience papers, and demonstration papers (about novel tool or technology features) related to the follow-ing or related topics:

  1. Insightful descriptions of the state-of-the-art in MBEE applications and services
  2. Proposals and descriptions for dealing with relevant challenges such as
    • Collaboration/Capture; e.g. Mapping, Deconfliction, Discovery
      • Interdisciplinary integration
      • Interorganizational federation and decentralization
      • Role and view management
      • Web-native application, services, collaboration, and versioning, liveness
      • Model (library) packaging and dependency management
    • Requirements/Design; e.g. Design Modeling, System Specifications and configurations
    • Analysis; e.g. simulation, model checking, visualization
      • o Continuous integration and analysis
    • Publication; e.g. Products, Documents
      • Document generation, storing analysis artifacts
    • Operation; e.g. DevOps, cyber security, access control, multi-tenancy, migration support, interoperability, cloud deployment
    • Application domains; e.g., Systems Engineering, Industry 4.0, robotics, cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things, smart cities
    • Relevant technological existing or emerging capabilities
      • Versioned graphs, model checking services, AI, analytics, data science, cloud computing, projectional editing
      • Active repository. Storing arbitrary models as graphs, more specifically trees with cross-references.
      • Big Data techniques, e.g., Extract, transform, load (ETL), distributed computing, scalability
      • NLP, Insights, ML, knowledge, transformation of unstructured into structured data, heuristics, weave and maintain semantic mappings
    • Tool and platform integration
  3. Proposals on how to better leverage relevant standards e.g., SysMLv2 language and SysMLv2 API, FMI, Conda, OpenAPI, OASIS Static Analysis Results Interchange Format (SARIF), Open Services for Lifecycle Collabo-ration (OSLC), Open Container Initiative
  4. Proposals and descriptions of integrating existing engineering platforms and open-source resources into a model based environment; e.g., Project Jupyter, engi-neering documents generation into/by Jupyter

The workshop defines an MBEE as a system environment which facilitates a formalized application of (systems) engineering by leveraging models where engineers can develop their system models for qualification and certification across a portfolio of engineering tools in multiple paradigms. Tools forming the MBEE can come from industry or academia and be freely available, open source, or commercial.

Intended paper format

EasyChair will be used to handle the submissions of papers in all categories. Submitted artifacts must be in English. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. All submissions will be reviewed by at least three PC members. Details on the acceptance criteria can be found on the workshop webpage.

Submissions should fall into one of four categories:

  1. Research transfer into practice: Describe how practitioners' needs (see ‘ Topics of Interest) drives a research project, how it is developed into a COTS or open-source product, and used in a MBEE for system development.
  2. Comparisons and evaluations of MBEEs: Describe the MBEE 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.
  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 de-velopment of high-quality MBEEs and supporting documentation and how they could be mitigated or removed are particularly encouraged.
  4. Descriptions of MBEEs: Describe (1) which areas of engineering activities the MBEE supports in a given domain and (2) the strengths and weaknesses of the MBEE in the context of the domain.
Submitted papers should belong to one of these paper categories, depending on the nature of the contribution:
  • Full papers (10 pages) present novel innovative approaches.
  • Short papers (5 pages) present new ideas or early-stage research, extensively discuss the experiences of the submitters with an OpenMBEE approach or demonstrate a tool or technology (related to one of the workshop’s topics).

Submissions will be peer reviewed by at least three members of the program committee.

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to attend the conference and present the paper in person.

All submissions must be in PDF. The page limit is strict, and it will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any point in the process (including after the paper is accepted).

Formatting instructions are available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for both LaTeX and Word users. LaTeX users must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble of the document (i.e., \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}). The review option adds line numbers, thereby allowing referees to refer to specific lines in their comments.

Submit your papers electronically via EasyChair

There will be joint workshop proceedings in the ACM Digital Library that include papers from all workshops.

  • Wed 22 Jul 2020 - Paper submission deadline
  • Fri 21 Aug 2020 - Notification to authors
  • Wed 02 Sep 2020 - Camera-ready deadline

Monday October 19, 2020

11:00 - 12:30 Montreal Time (GMT-4)

  • Welcome and OpenMBEE Intro (10’)
  • Keynote: Ed Seidewitz (25’+ 5’ Q&A) - “SysML v2: What’s the Big Deal, Anyway?”
  • Paper: Thomas Boyer Chammard (15’ + 10’ Q&A) - “Assisted Authoring of Model-Based Systems Engineering Documents”
  • Paper: Robbert Jongeling (15’ + 10’ Q&A) - “Towards boosting the OpenMBEE platform with model-code consistency”

13:30 - 15:00 Montreal Time (GMT-4)

  • Keynote: Markus Voelter (25’+ 5’ Q&A) – “Systems Engineering on the Web: a language-workbench perspective”
  • Paper: Andres Paz (15’ + 10’ Q&A) - “Breesse: Bridging EMF, Simulink and Stateflow for Model-Based Design of Safety-Critical Systems”
  • Paper: Benedek Horvath (15’ + 10’ Q&A) - “Model Checking as a Service: Towards Pragmatic Hidden Formal Methods”
  • Outbrief (10’)
  • Robert Karban - Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
  • Juergen Dingel - Queen's University
  • Syltinsy Jenkins - The MITRE Corporation
  • Rachel Mourning - Centauri
  • Marina Reich - Chemnitz University of Technology/Airbus
  • Akos Hajdu - Budapest University of Technology and Economics
  • Vince Molnar - Budapest University of Technology and Economics
  • Ivan Gomes - Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
  • Ahsan Qamar - Ford Motor Company
  • Lucas Lima - Rural Federal University of Pernambuco
  • Hisashi Miyashita - Mgnite Inc.
  • Brittany Friedland - Boeing Commercial Airplanes
  • Bjorn Cole - Lockheed Martin Corporation
  • Erich Lee - Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
  • George Walley - Ford Motor Company/INCOSE Michigan Chapter
  • Ákos Horváth - Budapest University of Technology and Economics
  • Andreas Schweiger - Airbus Defence and Space GmbH
  • Géza Kulcsár - IncQuery Labs

Robert Karban - Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

Robert Karban is the CAE Software and Systems Environment Chief Engineer in the Systems Engineering and Formulation Division at NASA/JPL. His team provides an environment for engineering modeling, supporting systems engineering and analysis activities, leveraging and integrating with the Software Environment. Both are provided to 4000+ engineers as the institutional platforms for systems and software engineering and analysis. Robert is internationally recognized as an industry leader in MBSE and MBE using his leadership role in the OpenMBEE community and as NASA representative at the OMG for SysML to align the different model based aspects. Prior to that, he developed control and instrumentation systems and software for large telescopes at the European Southern Observatory, pioneering MBSE for large systems applying model driven technology, and for particle accelerators at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. His career started at Siemens Medical developing System Software, and he received his M.S. in Computer Science from the Technical University of Vienna/Austria.

Ivan Gomes - Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

Ahsan Qamar - Ford Motor Company

Ahsan Qamar is a technical specialist for model-driven engineering (MDE) within the systems engineering organization at Ford Motor Company. His team is responsible for maturing the systems engineering practice at Ford, by researching, developing, and implementing modeling methodologies and applying them to vehicle programs. This is being applied to over 100 features and several system/component development workstreams within software, mechanical and electrical domains. He is also a principal investigator on Ford sponsored research with academia on Visual Analytics application to Safety and Reliability, and Variant Management. Ahsan is also a reviewer for research projects and research publications within MBSE and Safety internationally. Prior to Ford, Ahsan was a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech where he successfully managed and delivered research projects on MBSE for robotic manufacturing, inconsistency management, and tool interoperability for Flanders Make, Boeing and John Deere. He has a multidisciplinary background in control design, mechatronics, embedded systems and Model-Based Systems Engineering. He graduated with a MSc. in Electrical Engineering from Aalborg University Denmark, followed by a PhD. in Mechatronics from KTH-Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.

Juergen Dingel - Queen’s University

Sebastian Herzig - Microsoft Corporation

Ed Seidewitz - Model Driven Solutions

Ed Seidewitz is Chief Technology Officer of Model Driven Solutions, Inc., a long-time provider of enterprise and systems architecture services using model-based methods. He has 30 years of professional experience with the modeling, architecture and development of systems spanning diverse domains including aerospace, finance, acquisition and health care. He has been active with the Object Management Group (OMG) for 20 years, including involvement in UML, SysML, Foundational UML (fUML), Action Language for fUML (Alf), Precise Semantics of Composite Structures (PSCS) and Precise Semantics of State Machines (PSSM). He is currently co-leader of the SysML v2 Submission Team.

Markus Voelter - Independent

Markus works as a language engineer, bridging the gap from industry and business domains to software systems. He analyses domains, designs user-friendly languages and analyses, and implements language tools, IDEs, interpreters and generators. For 20 years, Markus has consulted, coached and developed in a wide range of industries, including finance, automotive, health, science and IT. He has published numerous papers in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, has written several books on the subject and spoken at many industry conferences world-wide. Markus has a diploma in technical physics from FH Ravensburg-Weingarten and a PhD in computer science from TU Delft. Reach him via http://voelter.de

Brittany Friedland - Boeing Commercial Airplanes

Brittany Friedland currently works for The Boeing Company as a systems engineer and architect developing and deploying Model Based Systems Engineering tools and processes to the Boeing Enterprise (Commercial and Defense). She is Boeing Object Model Group Representative and a member of the International Council of Systems Engineering. Brittany got her BSE in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan.

Bjorn Cole - Lockheed Martin Corporation