ABSTRACT
The convergence of control systems and software engineering is one of the most profound trends in technology today. Control engineers build on computing and communication technology to design robust, adaptive, and distributed control systems for operating plants with partially known nonlinear dynamics. Systems engineers face the problem of designing and integrating large-scale systems where networked embedded computing is increasingly taking over the role of “universal system integrator.” Software engineers need to design and build software that needs to satisfy requirements that are simultaneously physical and computational. This trend drives the widespread adoption of model-based design techniques for computer-based systems. The use of models on different levels of abstraction have been a fundamental approach in control and systems engineering. Lately, model-based software engineering methods, such as objective management group (OMG)’s model-driven architecture (MDA) [1,2] have gained significant momentum in the software industry, as well. The confluence of these factors has led to the emergence of model-driven engineering (MDE) that opens up the opportunity for the fusion of traditionally isolated disciplines.
