Alfonso Pierantonio     

The sheer complexity of software nowadays and its pervasiveness in everyday life have escalated the importance of managing abstraction by means models, modeling notations, and in general more model-based techniques. However, the proliferation of heterogeneous collections of related models in large-scale software development and their inherent complexity introduced an accidental complexity that requires advanced techniques for model management as well as model analysis. For instance, locating relevant information in a model repository presents interesting human and technical challenges because it requires the artifacts in the repository to be precisely classified, something that can not always be done manually.

This book provides an important overview of the most relevant and current aspects of model management and related analytical methods. It covers a full spectrum of topics covering foundations, methodological and empirical studies, and industrial applications. Interestingly, there is an aspect that emerges throughout the book that is particularly distinctive; most of the contributions assume that nowadays model-based techniques cannot neglect complexity, whether it be the size of the models, the extension of the collection of models, or their structural intricacy. As a consequence, it is of crucial relevance to have powerful and robust management and analysis techniques that build on a rigorous and solid basis and that focus not only on individual models but also on entire collections of them.

This volume also has another merit that goes beyond its technical content: it is current. It establishes that the most critical selling argument offered by Model-Driven Engineering goes beyond code generation. In this new age of global interconnectivity and interdependence, it is necessary to provide community-based methods and techniques to extract and analyze useful and relevant information from collections of modeling artifacts with state of the art knowledge on model management and model analysis. This book is a significant step in that direction.

May 2019, L'Aquila