Scope

Visual modeling techniques play an important role in the design and understanding of complex, software intensive systems. Block diagrams in systems engineering and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) in software engineering, are prominent examples of such visual modeling techniques.

Recently, integrated solutions have been proposed, such as UML 2.0, which provide a set of concepts that had been originally invented for systems engineering; an example is the “capsule” notation, which stems from Real-Time Object-Oriented Modeling with an origin in the telecommunications domain. The UML now adopts the ITU standards of MSC (Message Sequence Charts) and SDL (Specification and Description Language). The SysML extension of the UML for systems engineering starts to address the question how to reflect the steadily increasing software fraction of software intensive systems. These integration efforts between the systems engineering and software engineering domains are characterized by their informal and sometimes superficial nature. To fully unleash their methodological potential in practice, however, a full semantic integration of the employed visual modeling concepts and their underlying models is required.

In addition, many software intensive systems such as telecom networks, mobile systems, smart vehicles, ubiquitous systems, sensor networks, medical applications, command and control systems are dependable systems which can impact our daily lives or safety and security of our society. Therefore, their design has to consider many dependability attributes, such as real-time, security, safety, fault tolerance, software/hardware reliability, availability, etc. Visualization is a powerful tool to assist with the challenging task of design and development of dependable software intensive systems.

This first workshop on visual modeling for software intensive systems aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners to discuss and study the application of visual modeling techniques to software intensive systems, the achieved integration between the software and systems engineering views, and the challenges of dependability.

The specific areas of interests include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

-        Approaches for the visual modeling of software intensive systems, both in embedded and non-embedded domains

-       Comparisons of different visual modeling approaches for software intensive systems

-       Visual notations and tools for modeling system requirements (specification, analysis, and validation)

-        Visualization of non-functional design goals such as dependability, security, or performance

-       Visual modeling languages and methodologies for Software and Systems Architecture & Integration, including Model-Driven Architecture (MDA)

-       Test and verification using semi-formal and formal visual notations

-       Experience reports for the application of visual modeling approaches for software intensive systems to real life systems

Submission

The position paper must be submitted electronically as PDF via http://vmsis05.upb.de/. The paper submission should not exceed 8 pages and follow the IEEE Computer 8.5x11-inch style ftp://pubftp.computer.org/Press/Outgoing/proceedings/8.5x11%20-%20Format­ting%20files/. Papers submitted to the workshop will be reviewed by peers. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. A special section in a related journal is planned, if there are enough high quality submissions.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline                     20^thJune 2005

Notification of acceptance                      20^thJuly 2005

Camera-ready papers due                      20^thAugust 2005

Workshop Chairs

Holger Giese, University of Paderborn, Germany

Ingolf H. Krüger, University of California, San Diego, USA.

Kendra M.L. Cooper, The University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Program Committee

Manfred Broy, TUM, Germany

Kendra M.L. Cooper, University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Gregor Engels, University of Paderborn, Germany

Oystein Haugen, University of Oslo, Norway

Holger Giese, University of Paderborn, Germany

Gabor Karsai, Vanderbilt University, USA

Ferhat Khendek, Concordia Univeristy Montréal, Canada

Ingolf H. Krüger, University of California, San Diego, USA

Jochen Küster, IBM Research Zürich, Switzerland

Mark Minas, University of the Federal Armed Forces, Germany

Bernhard Rumpe, TU Braunschweig, Germany

Chris Salzmann, BMW CarIT, Germany

Andy Schürr, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany

Thomas Stauner, BMW CarIT, Germany

Bhavani Thuraisingham, University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Michael von der Beeck, BMW, Germany

Guido Wirtz, University of Bamberg, Germany

I-Ling Yen, The University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Kang Zhang, University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Albert Zündorf, University of Kassel, Germany