Model-driven development and search-based software engineering: an opportunity for research synergy

There is a sharply increasing research activity in the area of model-driven development, in particular in the context of the OMG standard named Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), which is relying on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its extensions. The basic idea is to carry software development as a series of model transformations, going from requirements to a platform independent model, to a platform specific model, and then to code generation. Development is therefore model-centric and many activities, including early design analysis and test case generation, are based on models using UML or adequate extensions. This keynote address will explain why there is a great opportunity for synergy between MDA and SBSE research. This will be illustrated by examples from recent research and industry collaborations.