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Astract: Legacy systems and their associated data models often evolve into large, monolithic artifacts. This threatens comprehensibility and maintainability by human beings. Breaking down a monolith into a modular structure is an established technique in software engineering. Several previous works aimed to adapt modularization also for conceptual data models. However, we currently see a research gap manifested in the absence of: (i) a flexible and extensible modularization concept for Entity Relationship (ER) models; (ii) of openly available tool support; and (iii) empirical evaluation. With this paper, we introduce a generic encoding of a modularization concept for ER models which enables the use of meta-heuristic search approaches. For the efficient application we introduce the ModulER tool. Eventually, we report on a twofold evaluation: First, we demonstrate feasibility and performance of the approach by two demonstration cases. Second, we report on an initial empirical experiment and a survey we conducted with modelers to compare automated modularizations with manually created ones and to better understand how humans approach ER modularization.

Keywords: •Building Information Modelling, Blockchain, Smart Contracts, Ethereum, Construction
Astract: There is a big potential for process optimizations, due to the digitalization gap in the construction business. New digital technologies, as the Building Information Modelling (BIM), are increasingly being adapted by the stakeholders in this area. On the other hand, blockchain is a very new and innovative technology domain which has grown immensely in the last several years, and where people are now trying to find the right use-cases. Especially, the even newer field of smart contract development has opened the door for a large amount of possible applications, where it is neither clear if these can actually be implemented as envisioned, nor if there is even a need for a decentralized solution at all. In a construction project, changes on BIM models are only to be approved by the appropriate stakeholder. Therefore, we have combined the BIM models, which are stored using a Git repository, with a release management workflow, which is realised as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain.This enables the workflow to be transparent, traceable and its results to be immutable. The goal of this work is to create a prototype and compare it to other (off-chain) solutions and to evaluate if an application of a combination of BIM and blockchain yields an advantage in terms of costs and security.

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Astract: Variability is crucial in the design of many advanced goods and it is also receiving increasing attention in production systems engineering. Since OPC Unified Architecture plays an important role when it comes to standardized information exchange in modern production systems, it can be a melting pot for information from various engineering domains, such as product design and production engineering - thus, it is an ideal place to hold variability information of products and production systems alike. Based on an initial variability information model we propose additional concepts for the persisting of configurations.

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Astract: Although Model-Based Software Engineering (MBE) is a widely accepted Software Engineering (SE) discipline, no agreed-upon core set of concepts and practices (i.e., a Body of Knowledge) has been defined for it yet. With the goals of characterizing the contents of the MBE discipline, promoting a global consistent view of it, clarifying its scope with regard to other SE disciplines, and defining a foundation for the development of educational curricula on MBE, this paper proposes the contents for a Body of Knowledge for MBE. We also describe the methodology that we have used to come up with the proposed list of contents, as well as the results of a survey study that we conducted to sound out the opinion of the community on the importance of the proposed topics and their level of coverage in the existing SE curricula.

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Astract: Model-driven engineering (MDE) provides tools and methods for the manipulation of formal models. In this letter, we leverage MDE for the transformation of production system models into flat files that are understood by general purpose planning tools and that enable the computation of "plans", i.e., sequences of production steps that are required to reach certain production goals. These plans are then merged back into the production system model, thus enriching the formalized production system knowledge.