Model-Driven Design and Organic Computing

It is difficult to relate a design approach to a term that stands for a class of computing systems that exhibit certain behaviors, as they belong to different phenomenologic categories. We will, however, compare the assumptions that the two approaches are based on, and draw our conclusions about the situations in which each of the strategies is useful. Model-driven design is an approach that aims at keeping the complexity of the design and implementation process of applications low, thus avoiding errors in application development. Model-driven design technologies use domainspecific modeling languages that provide means to describe the objects, object semantics, constraints, relations and behaviors that are relevant to the problems in the domain. Developers use these artifacts to build applications in the form of declarations that describe their design intent. In addition, model-driven design environments include software components to analyze models wrt. certain properties and to synthesize different representations (e.g., source code) and information about the model. The automatic generation of source code that is “correct by construction” from highlevel models is considered one of the major advantages of model-driven design and engineering over a the traditional, error prone software development process that strongly relies on manual coding [1]. Model driven design is applicable to application areas that are well understood. The modeling mechanisms of a design environment are expected to comprise all aspects (objects, relations, behaviors) of the domain that are necessary to build working applications. Together with the evaluation components they are the basis for constructing systems that are trusted to behave according to their intent. Organic Computing characterizes a research area that aims at building autonomous computing systems that dynamically adapt to changing environmental conditions. Organic computing systems use self-X properties (e.g., self-explaining, context awareness, self-organisation, selfhealing) to assess environmental conditions and their own