More Automation in Model Driven Development

Model Driven Development (MDD) earned a leading role in Software Engineering but still does not play its role in practice. In MDD, models are abstractions of implementations and development is a refinement process with as much automation as possible e.g. code generation. In practice, the distance between logical models and implementations prevents automatic refinements and code generation. We revisit the MDD schema and we propose a method based on both forward engineering and reverse-engineering activities leading to Model Driven Engineering. Forward engineering is structured by layered macro-transformations parametrised by the abstractions of platforms obtained by reverse-engineering. We illustrate the method with a small distributed physical system case study. This work helps practitioners to automate MDD.