Softw Syst Model (2017) 16:307–308

DOI 10.1007/s10270-017-0596-7

EDITORIAL

Models for the digital transformation

Published online: 11 April 2017

“Digital transformation” is currently an important trend Of course, within the context of SoSyM, the key question
that penetrates many industrial and societal domains. The is the extent to which models can aid the emerging digital
phrase is also emerging as a buzzword that allows differ- transformation needs.
ent stakeholders to inject various forms of innovation into As SoSyM readers may observe, models have much poten-
their respective company, business, government, academic tial toward achieving the goals of digital transformation.
institution, or other public services. The nuances of digital Below are a few possible contexts for application, among
transformation are broad and have not yet been defined pre- others that we are sure could be suggested by the SoSyM
cisely, but even job advertisements often contain the phrase. readership:
Deconstructing the term from its two primary words,
we identify two well-known concepts. “Transformation” (1) One of our Editors, Ulrich Frank, recently wrote that
describes a general process that starts with some initial sit- models can be used beneficially to mitigate the dif-
uation that moves toward a changed, and supposedly better ferences and challenges that emerge between different
situation. May be that in this case the word transformation worlds that speak very unique languages. This becomes
is not the best word choice because the underlying transfor- obvious when considering the various stakeholders that
mation may never meet a stable end, but rather undergo a come into contact with Digital Products or services.
continual set of evolutionary optimizations related to new Each stakeholder may have individual domain-specific
forms of business, production, logistics, medicine or other terms to describe his or her needs, capabilities, and
changes within the targeted domain. “Digital” suggests that unique information resources.
many changes in society, business and industry will be driven (2) Digital transformation often co-exists with large data
by information technologies that allow data to be processed sets that are associated with some processing need of
in real-time and even used to intelligently derive information the transformation context. Data has structure. For an
to finally to provide stakeholders with improved knowledge explicit, well-founded handling of this data, models are
about their processes and products. Downstream digitization necessary to describe the data structure, but also how
would also allow optimization, automation activities and pro- to manipulate the data and retrieve it efficiently. Trans-
duction techniques of various forms. formation models describe how to slice, select, join, or
aggregate data to retrieve useful information. Beyond
manipulation of data, there is much software that is nec-
essary to handle, manage and visualize this data. In the
future, traditional software engineering techniques may
B Bernhard Rumpe
[Link]@[Link] use models to design such systems, or models at runtime
Jeff Gray
will describe specific techniques within a rather generic
[Link]@[Link] software package (e.g., database, statistics packages or
visualization components).
1 University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA (3) The design of digital products and the development of
2 RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany product lines using digital technologies will lead to a

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308 J. Gray, B. Rumpe

very challenging integration problem for the physical It may also be the case that models and modeling languages
components of a system, as well as the development have become mainstream in many domains, such that it is not
methodologies and their tools. Many of these tools use regarded as a research topic anymore, but more as a helpful
very specific forms of models, written in proprietary or tool that is commonly available and can be used out of the
semi-standardized modeling languages, that will need box. While the latter points to a desirable level of maturity
a syntactic, semantic and tool-based integration. for models, there is still plenty of research and application
(4) While traditional engineering uses human-generated opportunity for modeling, model languages, as well as gener-
models to prescribe aspects of the system under devel- ative and analytical tooling, that can be applied to the ongoing
opment, machine learning and data mining techniques pursuits of digital transformation.
have the potential to reverse this relation by extracting
Content of this Issue
models from sets of running data. It will be interesting to
This issue contains the Special Issue on “Modeling—
see how prescriptive and extracted models fit together,
Foundations and Applications”, with Ana Moreira, Bernhard
if at all.
Schätz, Peter Clarke, and Antonio Vallecillo as Guest Edi-
tors. The included papers are described in the Guest Editorial.
There is a deep list of research topics that need to be explored
This issue also contains five Regular Papers:
in order to derive the understanding that will bring a pure
data-driven world together with prescriptive design models.
• “Aspectual Templates in UML” by Gilles Vanwormhoudt,
Particularly, the application of machine learning currently too
Olivier Caron, and Bernard Carré
often relearns already well-known models, because prescrip-
• “Proactive Modeling: A New Model Intelligence Tech-
tive models and machine learning are not well integrated.
nique” by James Hill, Tanumoy Pati, and Sowmya Kolli
Colleagues recently applied big data analytics in a larger
• “Using Contexts to Extract Models from Code” by Lucio
industrial project that at first and foremost re-uncovered basic
Duarte, Jeff Kramer, and Sebastian Uchitel
physical laws from a set of production data. While this result
• “Model-based Tool Support for Tactical Data Links: An
may be interesting from a machine learning perspective, the
Experience Report from the Defence Domain” by Dim-
end result was not very helpful given the physical laws were
itrios Kolovos, Suraj Ajit, Chris Holmes, Julian Johnson,
already well-known.
and Richard Paige
In the current discussion in the research literature about
• “Contract-based Modeling and Verification of Timed
digital transformation, models do not play a prominent role.
Safety Requirements within SysML” by Iulia Dragomir,
This may be because many people researching and apply-
Iulian Ober, and Christian Percebois.
ing digital transformation are not aware of the possibilities
and capabilities of using models of appropriate languages.

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