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Ubiquitous web applications (UWA) are a new type of web applications which are accessed in various contexts, i.e. through different devices, by users with various interests, at anytime from anyplace around the globe. For such full‐fledged, complex software systems, a methodologically sound engineering approach in terms of model‐driven engineering (MDE) is crucial. Several modeling approaches have already been proposed that capture the ubiquitous nature of web applications, each of them having different origins, pursuing different goals and providing a pantheon of concepts. This paper aims to give an in‐depth comparison of seven modeling approaches supporting the development of UWAs.

This methodology is conducted by applying a detailed set of evaluation criteria and by demonstrating its applicability on basis of an exemplary tourism web application. In particular, five commonly found ubiquitous scenarios are investigated, thus providing initial insight into the modeling concepts of each approach as well as to facilitate their comparability.

The results gained indicate that many modeling approaches lack a proper MDE foundation in terms of meta‐models and tool support. The proposed modeling mechanisms for ubiquity are often limited, since they neither cover all relevant context factors in an explicit, self‐contained, and extensible way, nor allow for a wide spectrum of extensible adaptation operations. The provided modeling concepts frequently do not allow dealing with all different parts of a web application in terms of its content, hypertext, and presentation levels as well as their structural and behavioral features. Finally, current modeling approaches do not reflect the crosscutting nature of ubiquity but rather intermingle context and adaptation issues with the core parts of a web application, thus hampering maintainability and extensibility.

Different from other surveys in the area of modeling web applications, this paper specifically considers modeling concepts for their ubiquitous nature, together with an investigation of available support for MDD in a comprehensive way, using a well‐defined as well as fine‐grained catalogue of more than 30 evaluation criteria.

This purpose of this paper is to present ISML-MDE, a model-driven environment that includes ISML, a platform-independent modeling language for enterprise applications; ISML-GEN, a code generation framework to automatically generate code from models; and LionWizard, a tool to automatically integrate different components into a unified codebase.

The development comprises five stages: standardizing architecture; refactoring and adapting existing components; automating their integration; developing a modeling language; and creating code generators. After development, model-to-code ratios in ISML-MDE are measured for different applications.

The average model-to-code ratio is approximately 1:4.6 when using the code generators from arbitrary models. If a model transformation is performed previously to the code generation, this ratio raises to 1:115. The current validation efforts show that ISML properly supports several DSL essential characteristics described by Kahraman and Bilgen (2015).

ISML-MDE was tested on relatively small applications. Further validation of the approach requires measurement of development times and their comparison with previous similar projects, to determine the gains in productivity.

The value of ISML-MDE can be summarized as follows: ISML-MDE has the potential to significantly reduce development times, because of an adequate use of models and transformations. The design of ISML-MDE addresses real-world development requirements, obtained from a tight interaction between the researchers and the software development company. The underlying process has been thoroughly documented and it is believed it can be used as a reference for future developments of MDE tools under similar conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the relationships between process modeling and Industry 4.0, the strategic themes and the most used process modeling language in smart factories. The study also presents the growth of the field of study worldwide, the perspectives, main challenges, trends and suggestions for future works.

To do this, a science mapping was performed using the software SciMAT, supported by VOS viewer.

The results show that the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Petri Net are the most relevant languages to smart manufacturing. The authors also highlighted the need to develop new languages or extensions capable of representing the dynamism, interoperability and multiple technologies of smart factories.

It was possible to identify the most used process modeling languages in smart environments and understand how these languages assist control and manage smart processes. Besides, the authors highlighted challenges, new perspectives and the need for future works in the field.

The World Wide Web has undergone a rapid transition from the originally static hypertext to an ubiquitous hypermedia system. Today, the Web is not only used as a basis for distributed applications (Web applications), moreover it serves as a generic architecture for autonomous applications and services. Many research work has been done regarding the modeling and engineering process of Web applications and various platforms, frameworks and development kits exist for the efficient implementation of such systems. Concerning the modeling process, many of the published concepts try to merge traditional hypermedia modeling with techniques from the software engineering domain. Unfortunately, those concepts which capture all facets of the Web’s architecture become rather bulky and are eventually not applicable for a model‐driven Web application development. Moreover, there is a need for frameworks which address both, the modeling process and the implementation task and allow a model driven, semi‐automatic engineering process using CASE tools. This paper outlines the DaVinci Web Engineering Framework which supports the modeling as well as the semi‐automated implementation of Web applications. The DaVinci Architectural Layer specifies a persistent, hierarchical GUI model and a generic interaction scheme. This allows the elimination of the hypermedia paradigm, which turned out to be rather practical when building Web applications.

The development of mobile applications in multiple clouds environment is a complex task because of the lack of platform standards in cloud computing and mobile computing. The source code involves various proprietary programming libraries for different platforms. However, functionalities are inevitably changed over time, as well as the platform. Therefore, a great deal of development effort is required, when changes need to be made at functional and platform level. This paper aims to propose SIMON, a framework that eases complexity of the development to support software evolution.

SIMON shields the developer from the complexity of mobile and cloud platforms in the development of mobile applications in multiple clouds environment. The framework uses model of application design to automate the development and support execution of mobile applications in system environment that needs integration to the number of data sources located on multiple clouds. The framework is composed of prefabricated components that support function changeability and platform adaptability.

The framework is examined with the development of a sample application. After it is evaluated with scenarios that involve changing at functional and platform levels, the result shows significant reducing of the development effort by comparing with the other approaches.

The framework facilitates the implementation of mobile applications in the software system that involves integration to multiple clouds, and it supports software evolution with lesser development effort.

Current practice when specifying and developing manufacturing software leads to enterprise systems that are difficult to change. With the purpose of improving current practice a model‐driven, component‐based approach to engineering change capable manufacturing systems is described. Application of the approach is supported by a number of proof‐of‐concept system design and construction environments. Each environment organises the use of modelling tools that function to formally capture and apply the results of systems engineering activities carried out by members of project teams. In this way the development of multi‐perspective enterprise (enterprise: a group of organisations sharing a set of goals and objectives to offer products, services or both (ISO 14258)) models is enabled in a computer executable form and means are provided to reconfigure manufacturing systems by using the models to change the way that system components interoperate. Collectively the proof‐of‐concept environments have demonstrated a capability to engineer a variety of types of manufacturing system and by so doing implement a system structure that accommodates rather than inhibits subsequent change, even where that change is of an unforeseen nature.

This article proposes the concept of web clientserver event together with its associated taxonomy which yields a formal specification for such an event. The concept, in conjunction with the concept of atomic use case (reviewed in the article), is then used as a key element for a model‐driven approach to web information system development. The outcome is a new method for web information systems development that reduces the complex web‐based hypermedia navigation behaviour to a much simpler event‐driven behaviour. On the strength of that realized simplicity, the method provides (i) a set of platform‐independent models that completely characterizes the application, and (ii) a well‐defined process to map the combined model to any chosen platform‐dependent implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the method engineering perspective for service-oriented system engineering (SOSE). A number of SOSE methods have been proposed in both academia and industry. Given this, many intuitive, common questions arise. To answer these questions, many comparison frameworks have been developed. Each of which has considered certain methodological perspectives. However, less attention has been given to the method engineering (ME) perspective. The authors argue that this perspective would answer the question “what ME to apply in order to produce SOSE methods that themselves produce quality services at different levels of abstraction and SBAs”. This research question is further decomposed into other questions; the main one is “whether the existing ME do apply to service orientation”. Answering such a question would lead to either developing SOSE methods by using the existing ME or developing a new ME or framework for the specifics of SOSE.

This work first provides a literature review on ME approaches and techniques; then, it compares a sample of existing SOSE methods with respect to their ME within a comparison framework that comprises a set of relevant properties of a solution that would be provided by an SOSE method, namely, service-oriented architecture (SOA) adoption, quality of services and ME; and finally, it discusses the applicability of the existing ME to SOSE.

Strengths and weaknesses of the existing methods with respect to the aforementioned criteria, in addition to SOSE methodology open issues, were identified. The comparison has shown that while the existing SOSE methods have proved their success in a specific task, they still present some weaknesses. Therefore, it is better to benefit from the advantages of the existing ME techniques, notable method fragments, even if they need some alteration.

While this work has many open issues related to SOSE methods with respect to ME, it could be further developed in many directions by exploring the open issues. For instance, the generation of a new ME technique and application of this new ME technique to the existing SOSE methods to see to what extent the existing methods may be situational.

This work has practical implications, as it provides a better understanding of different views of SOSE methods, and assists the method engineers in deciding which ME technique is most suitable to their situation.

The produced artifact provides a research roadmap toward SOSE ME.

None of the existing comparison frameworks for SOSE methods has considered the criteria such as SOA adoption and ME techniques. Indeed, ME techniques and approaches would allow better reuse of the existing proven fragments of methods.

The purpose of this research is to enable dynamic customization of metadata that describes educational resources in digital repositories.

Users need to describe educational resources in digital repositories according to a user-specific metadata set. As users generally do not have the skills to customize the software application manually, this approach relies on the techniques of model-driven software engineering, which should allow customization of the software application programmatically with no need to develop or order a new software application. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the proposed solution.

A software platform for managing educational resources described by dynamically extendable metadata is proposed. The platform enables the creation of data models that are programmatically transformed to a Web application for the management of educational resources. In this way, users can create their own models of metadata that are relevant in a particular domain.

The solution has been verified by users with technical knowledge. The appropriateness of the model should still be explored for domain experts with little technical knowledge who desire to define new metadata in their domain.

The solution can be used for digital repositories that store diverse educational resources. Each resource could be described using metadata that relates to the domain the resource belongs to.

Digital repositories standardly describe educational resources using some general metadata, which are more focused on the physical characteristics of resources rather than their semantics. The proposed solution introduces custom domain-specific semantics into the description of the resources, which improves their retrieval.

This paper aims to present the Modelery, a platform for collaborative repository to support model-based software development. The Modelery is a Web platform, composed both by a Web page and Web services for interoperability.

By performing a study in the existing platforms, it was possible to achieve a set of issues to tackle. The issues enabled the possibility to define a set of requirements that allowed the authors to design a new platform, and to perform a model-driven software development process, which started from the requirements until reaching the final software solution.

With this work, it was possible to perform a survey on the currently available artifacts repositories, categorize them and identify their shortcomings. This was essential to define the set of requirements for a new platform to overcome the identified issues. This process leads to a platform able to improve the currently available solutions, and validated in the scientific community. In this paper, the authors also explore the applications of the repository. First, they use the Modelery to replace an older model’s repository. Second, they have enabled the communication between other tools and the Modelery via Web services.

This work presents a new Web repository for software artifacts aimed at supporting researchers and software developers. The presented platform is an improvement over other platforms on the integration of artifacts repository, social functionalities and scientific publications integration. The authors conclude this paper by comparing the achieved platform in terms of functionalities, against the other analyzed platforms.