Most Influential Paper Award at MODELS 2014 conference

A very prestigious Most Influential Paper Award was given to Dániel Varró and András Pataricza at MODELS 2014.

The IEEE/ACM 17th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering, Languages and Systems, which is the most important scientific forum of model driven systems and software engineering.

In each year, the most influential paper is selected by Steering Committee from the papers presented 10 years ago at the conference based upon the relevance and long-term impact of the paper. This year, the paper  "Generic and Meta-Transformations for Model Transformation Engineering" presented at UML 2004 by D. Varró and A. Pataricza, was selected by the committee (which is available at Springer and for non-commercial use as a personal copy).

The Fault Tolerant Systems Research Group at the Department of Measurement and Information Systems started research on model transformations almost 20 years ago as a member of the first EU project on this specific topic. Model transformations aim to support systems engineering by automatically synthesizing mathematical models amenable to correctness proofs, calibration as well as dependability analysis prior to implementation.

Nowadays, more than 80% of the implementation for dependable systems (e.g. in automotive or avionics applications) is dominated by software-intensive solutions. By now, model transformation has become a key background technology in critical systems industry which enables the precise analysis and design as well as the automated generation of the source code for such software.

Fifteen years ago, this field was only in the focus of few academic groups dominated by theoretical research. Since then, research results have provided the foundations of 2 DSc theses, 7 PhD theses and over 30 MSc theses in the Fault Tolerant Systems Research Group.

The prize-winner paper was the first to highlight the attention of international research groups that model transformations should be treated from a software engineering aspect. Thus it triggered the systematic application of software design methods for model transformation engineering and gave rise to the research and development of model transformation frameworks supporting the analysis and design of model transformations.

The paper was also a milestone for the development of an open source software, the VIATRA2 VIATRA2 model transformation framework. Several researchers, PhD and MSc students at the department and three start-up companies of the research group have actively contributed to it in the past 10 years. VIATRA2 and the related EMF-IncQuery framework, which supports incremental model queries was used in over 15 research groups all over the world (including CERN and NASA) and at numerous industrial companies (such as Ericsson, Thales, and ThyssenKruppPresta).

Its continuous development was supported by 10 European research projects, 3 IBM Faculty Awards and a collaborative project with Embraer, the third largest civil airframer in the world.
On October 2nd at the MODELS 2014 conference in Valencia, Spain, a 60 minute presentation was be delivered by Dániel Varró about the main ideas of the original paper and its impact.