As enterprises inevitably change, the IT systems that support them must adapt to those changes. There are literally several hundred billion lines of legacy code in production use. Hence, there is a need for well-defined, robust enterprise architectures that can be rapidly adapted to suit their evolving environment and meet changing requirements. To apply model-based techniques to such systems, it is beneficial to have an approach that would work bottom-up as well as top down. In other words, we have to deal not only with generation towards the platforms of the present and the future, but also with recovery from the platforms of the past. Essentially, modernization of legacy systems involves applying techniques such as refactoring, restructuring, translation, migration and integration to existing software assets. This workshop aims to employ techniques from OMG’s Model Driven Architecture^TM (MDA) to this problem.

The popularity of MDA stems from the capabilities offered to separate application domain logic from the underlying execution platform aspects. A large majority of early MDA efforts are of the translational, or synthesis style. That is, new software artifacts are generated whole-scale from properties that are refined from platform-independent models, down to platform-specific models, eventually leading to code. Although many systems delivered today support flexible initial configuration, the reality is that already-deployed and configured systems need to be adapted, often while maintaining continuous service. While the current trend to model-driven development provides a framework for designing and developing new systems by separating implementation concerns from system specification, changes to the system specification require evolving the previously generated systems and their associated code and data artifacts. Indeed, most systems are not "green-field" developments, so adapting today's enterprise systems may involve integrating new subsystems, as well as evolving and bridging existing subsystems.

The combination of reverse and forward model-driven engineering discloses an important number of new and difficult research problems that need to be seriously identified and progressively solved. This challenge is made even more difficult when considering that a legacy system is much broader than just code. It consists also of data encoded in a huge number of file formats, or encapsulated in proprietary form in various tool repositories. The OMG's Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM) is one initiative which aims to bridge the gap between modernization tools and techniques for adaptable systems development provided by MDA.

The MELS workshop provided a collaborative forum for the participants to exchange recent or preliminary results, to conduct intensive discussions on a particular topic, and to coordinate efforts between representatives of a technical community. Workshop topics of interest included:

Workshop proceedings were published on the conference CD-ROM and archived in the IEEE Digital Library. The CD-ROM version of the papers, and the workshop presentations, are available below. Alternatively, all of the papers and presentations can be downloaded from a single zip file by clicking here.

Jeff Gray (University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA)