ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award 2020

Christos Tsigkanos and co-authors have won an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) Distinguished Paper Award at the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2020). The paper, titled “Scalable Multiple-View Analysis of Reactive Systems via Bidirectional Model Transformations”, was co-authored by colleagues Nianyu Li, Zhi Jin and Zhenjiang Hu at Peking University, and Carlo Ghezzi at Politecnico di Milano. The ACM SIGSOFT is the premier professional organization in the software engineering area, and ASE is one of the major research conferences sponsored by ACM SIGSOFT.

The paper addresses systematic model-driven design and early validation by advocating multiple-view analyses of systems - in practice, requirements may come from multiple stakeholders often concerned with different facets. The technique advocated automatically projects a specification of a reactive system into submodels depending on properties capturing stakeholders’ viewpoints. Projections are not only smaller than the source model but also equivalent to it from the standpoint of specific properties; thus verification via model checking, which may be unfeasible for the source reactive system model, may become feasible for the submodel. If stakeholders propose a change to a submodel based on their own view, changes are automatically propagated to the source model and other views affected. Automated reflection is achieved thanks to bidirectional model transformations, ensuring correctness.