Consistency Management in Software-Intensive Systems

Theme:

Over the last decades, the fast-growing complexity of everyday software-intensive systems has forced industry and academia to use and investigate different development techniques to manage the many different aspects of the systems, especially when these systems are heterogeneous and there is a need to combine interdisciplinary engineering models (i.e., models created by engineers from different expertise and different domains).

This new generation of systems requires maximizing the use of models and data collected throughout the system life cycle, which needs to be processed, organized and structured to help to manage and improve the systems. As a consequence, during the overall system engineering lifecycle different modeling techniques, languages, and tools are employed requiring efficient mechanisms for maintaining the consistency of two or more related sources of information. In fact, supporting the consistency management across multiple models requires understanding the relationship between these models that they should maintain a (multi-)model consistency requirement as changes in one model affect other models. As a consequence, these relationships can be defined, by means of traceability and bidirectional correspondences among the different artefacts.

Using the automotive industry as an example, the development of cars has evolved in the last decades from pure mechanical engineering to multidisciplinary engineering where engineers from different domains (including software engineering, electrical engineering, safety engineering, and mechanical engineering) are involved. For instance, system engineering models are employed early to capture requirements and basic structuring of the entire system, while software engineering models are used later on to describe the concrete software architecture. Each model helps in addressing the specific design issue with appropriate notations and at a suitable level of abstraction. Finally, while the traditional method uses a linear approach, where the stages of the software development process must be completed in sequential order, today’s methodology uses iterative and incremental approaches, where the development processes are executed in parallel, increasing the need for synchronization and consistency management approaches.

The main challenges associated with this context are related to: model synchronization, interoperability between languages and tools, model and multi-model consistency maintenance, management of inconsistencies, traceability and correspondences.

This theme invites researchers from different areas including software engineering, programming languages, databases, and document engineering. Contributions in the area of software development of embedded and software-intensive systems, self-adaptive systems, cyber-physical systems are welcome.

This special issue welcomes contributions regarding languages, methods, techniques, tools and experience reports about adopting consistency management, as well as empirical studies, e.g., case studies, investigating the cost and benefits of consistency management approaches.

The topics relevant to this special issue include, but are not restricted to, the following:

• heterogeneous modeling
• consistency management of data, models and multi-models
• interoperability between languages and tools
• traceability
• bidirectional communications and correspondences
• bidirectional transformations
• bidirectional programming languages and frameworks
• data and model synchronization
• synchronization for [email protected]
• view updating and view adaptation
• change propagation and (co)evolution
• model/metamodel/transformation coevolution
• benchmarks, case studies, and tool support

Surveys, (Systematic) Literature Reviews or Mapping Studies are out of the scope of the special issue and will be desk-rejected.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: 30 June 2021

First notification: 30 Sept 2021

Revision: 30 Dec 2021

Second notification: 30 March 2022

Final version: 30 May 2022

Guest editors

Romina Eramo, University of L’Aquila, Italy ([email protected])

Zhenjiang Hu, Peking University, China ([email protected])

Manuel Wimmer, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria ([email protected])

Editors-in-Chief

Paris Avgeriou and David Shepherd

Special Issue Editors

Wing-Kwong Chan and Raffaela Mirandola

Submission Guidelines:

The call for this special issue is an open call.

Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has neither appeared in, nor is under consideration by, other journals or conferences. If an earlier version of this work has been published, then this submission must be at least 30% different in terms of contribution and the authors should explain in the introduction the delta between this new paper and the prior version. Authors are requested to attach to the submitted paper their relevant, previously published articles and a summary document explaining the enhancements made in the journal version.

All manuscripts and any supplementary material should be submitted through the Editorial Manager at https://www.editorialmanager.com/jssoftware . Follow the submission instructions given on this site. All submitted papers should adhere to the general principles of the Journal of Systems and Software articles. Submissions have to be prepared according to the Guide for Authors, available on the journal website. The submitted paper must follow the format specified in the JSS Guide for Authors https://www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-systems-and-software/0164-1212/guide-for-authors.

Decisions:

Each submission will be reviewed by at least three expert reviewers. The guest editors, together with the Editors-in-Chief and the Special Issues Editors will make the final decisions.

For more information about the special issue, please contact the guest editors.