Recent technological advancements have led to an increasingly interconnected world, leading to new, autonomous smart devices and services that permeate everyday life (Internet of Things) and industry (Industry 4.0). This opens up a wide array of opportunities for applications in diverse domains. At the same time, the systems supporting these applications are reaching new levels of complexity, necessitating appropriate engineering methodologies.

Model-driven Engineering provides the required foundations for formally rigorous development of software-intensive systems, but is still a long way from realizing its full potential, and the adoption in industry remains limited. The Smart Modeling project is aimed at providing a thematic framework to facilitate knowledge exchange between computing science research groups at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, and the Urgench branch of Tashkent University of Information Technologies in Uzbekistan, as well as industry partners. The project’s workshops act as student and doctoral symposium to promote young researchers, and as discussion forum to identify research and collaboration opportunities based on scientific challenges and concrete industry needs. Major outcomes will be a comprehensive report on the state of the art of model-driven engineering, jointly developed by participating young researchers, and concrete proposals for follow-up collaborative projects to advance Smart Modeling research, improve its coverage in education, and transfer results into practical application.

Technological advancement of recent years has brought with it an increasing pervasiveness of the internet. More and more devices are being equipped with network connectivity to autonomously provide smarter services, forming the Internet of Things (IoT). Applications are wide-ranging, and have variously been termed Smart X, including Smart Homes, Smart Factories (Industry 4.0), Smart Government, Smart City, Smart Grid, Smart Traffic Control, and many more.

These novel applications are realized by interconnected systems of highly heterogeneous hardware, software, and embedded systems: Cyber-physical systems introduce new levels of complexity, requiring appropriate engineering methodologies to support formally rigorous software and systems development. Model-driven Engineering (MDE) provides fitting foundations, and is considered an enabling technology for advancing software engineering principles and practices to support Smart X applications. Yet, the current state of the art of MDE is still a long way from realizing its full potential, and the adoption in industry remains limited. This joint project between the Tashkent University of Information Technology, Uzbekistan (TUIT), and University of Oldenburg’s Software Engineering Group (UOL) is dedicated to combine each partner institute’s expertise and experience. The central theme will be contributing towards a needs-based improvement of MDE techniques, methods, and tools, and researching novel, smart modeling techniques and applications, to address challenges posed by future software-intensive systems.