Call for Papers

Scope

Current society heavily relies on software and software systems. Due to its increasing complexity, the design and operation of software systems are becoming challenging. In the last decades, a great deal of effort has been put into addressing software systems design, development, and maintenance challenges. Empirical evidence shows that one of the most critical success factors when developing software systems is their Software Architecture (SA). A SA describes software systems in terms of software components, their interactions, and critical quality attributes. Among other benefits, SAs improve the overall communication among different stakeholders, are the carriers of significant design decisions, promote the use of different abstraction levels, and allow for the early assessment of the software under development.

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a paradigm that refers to the systematic use of models as first-class entities throughout the software engineering life cycle. MDE shifts the focus of software development from third-generation programming languages to models. Within MDE, models are manipulated automatically using software programs, also known as model transformations.

In recent years, several studies have been discussing the interplay of SA and MDE, focusing on the benefits of combining these two disciplines. For instance, several works have been proposing the use of metamodels and modeling languages and the formal representation of software (reference) architectures. Other works have focused on using models and metamodels to represent the different structures and quality views. Additional research has been investigating the use of model transformations as automation to enable early analysis and simulation of SAs. Eventually, the interplay between SA and MDE could be beneficial from a tooling perspective, as it would enable the re-use of techniques and technologies used for manipulating (meta)models in the context of SAs.

Despite the advancements, several open challenges still compel the effective interplay between SA and MDE.

MDE4SA 2026 aims to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners where novel and innovative solutions to current and future challenges on the interplay between SAs and MDE can be presented and discussed.

Topics of interest

The workshop is a forum where researcher and practitioners can share current problems and innovative solutions including, but not limited to:

- Model-driven techniques and methodologies for designing SA
- Architectural description of SA design, considering logical and physical aspects through MDE
- Model-driven approaches for defining and measuring Quality-of-Service (QoS) in SAs
- Analysis of architectural designs and architectural patterns
- Approaches for migrating legacy architecture towards microservice architectures, serverless by means of MDE techniques
- Industrial practices and tools supporting the adoption of MDE into SA
- Methodologies adopted in industrial contexts
- Model repositories for SA
- Code generation from SA models and transformation approaches
- Change Propagation in SA views and consistency management
- Evolution of SA through modeling
- Empirical studies on SA and MDE areas

Submission

Committees