Overview of the Modelling of the Physical World (MOTPW) Workshop at MODELS 2012

Abstract

Since the popularity of models and related tools for the development of software has become more mature, the applications of approaches from the modelling community has begun to be used on models of physical objects, such as buildings, machines and biological systems. This has revealed to software tool researchers that modelling and model manipulation from physical world perspectives has been applied a lot longer in many of these domains than in software. However, as software modelling follows software trends, software modellers and tool builders have been able to take advantage of new developments such as the open source movement, and agile software methodologies. This has increasingly drawn architects, engineers, biologists and others concerned with physical systems to the software modelling community. This workshop aimed to meet two complimentary goals: providing a focus on physical modelling and its use of software engineering approaches; and attempting to learn lessons in the software community from the longer established disciplines of modelling real world objects and systems which often requires more rigour and narrower margins for failure than software typically achieves. We also hoped that some islands in the IT community may be bridged through the example of bridges between models used in physical disciplines and software models.