Engineering Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs) heavily relies on Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), which are tailored to a specific class of problems inherent to CPPSs. DSLs enable non-programming experts to solve problems in their domain, such as modeling production processes, implementing control software, or managing the variability of production systems. A DSL ecosystem encompasses the entire infrastructure (e.g., libraries and tools) built around its language and contributes to the successful and easy adoption thereof by domain experts. We present a maturity evaluation model for DSL ecosystems serving two aims: to developers, it reveals missing but essential aspects of the ecosystem, and users (e.g., industrial companies) can evaluate the maturity of a DSL ecosystem. We propose criteria to evaluate the maturity of DSL ecosystems and apply them to existing, publicly available DSLs which have been adopted in CPPSs. The results demonstrate that all components of the model are covered and they allow for deriving hypotheses about DSL ecosystems used in CPPSs.

Today’s Internet of Things (IoT) applications are mostly developed as a bundle of hardware and associated software. Future cross-manufacturer app stores for IoT applications will require that the strong coupling of hardware and software is loosened. In the resulting IoT applications, a quintessential challenge is the effective and efficient deployment of IoT software components across variable networks of heterogeneous devices. Current research focuses on computing whether deployment requirements fit the intended target devices instead of assisting users in successfully deploying IoT applications by suggesting deployment requirement relaxations or hardware alternatives. This can make successfully deploying large-scale IoT applications a costly trial-and-error endeavor. To mitigate this, we have devised a method for providing such deployment suggestions based on search and backtracking. This can make deploying IoT applications more effective and more efficient, which, ultimately, eases reducing the complexity of deploying the software surrounding us.

Model-driven systems engineering relies on software languages that support different stakeholders. These languages often operate in different technological spaces. Checking consistency, tracing, and change propagation of models developed by different stakeholders, thus demands methods to bridge the gaps between these spaces. Research on the integration of heterogeneous software languages often considers heterogeneity within specific technological spaces only. We outline a systematic method to translate grammars between the technological spaces of the MontiCore and Xtext language workbench (LWB) and report observations on general grammar translation challenges. We have realized this translation in an automated toolchain and present lessons learned along the way. This can significantly facilitate bridging different technological spaces and, thus, improve model-driven systems engineering