From Business Application Execution to Design Through Model-Based Reporting

Abstract

Cross-disciplinary models constitute essential instruments to master complexity. Often it is easier to relate to high-level concepts than to deal with low-level technical details. In model-driven engineering (MDE) models are designated a pivotal role from which systems are generated. As such, MDE enables different stakeholders of business applications to participate in the engineering process. Until now however, MDE does not penetrate phases beyond generation and deployment such as monitoring, analysis, and reporting. To display information from runtime and analytics it would be interesting if reporting could utilize models from design time. Therefore, this paper presents model-based reporting (MbR). Bridging the gap between reporting and design, it enables stakeholders to intuitively specify the reporting through a domain-specific language (DSL) while accelerating development cycles. In non-model-driven settings, MbR can help to introduce models as a first step towards MDE.