This document describes a Ph.D. level course, corresponding to a Curriculum Unit creditedwith 5 ECTS. It corresponds to a joint DIUM -FEUP proposal for UCPC (Paradigms of Computation) in the joint MAP-i doctoral program in Informatics, organized by three portuguese universities (Minho, Aveiro, and Porto).

Available online 19 November 2011

Spreadsheets are widely used and studies show that most of the existing ones contain non-trivial errors. To improve end-users productivity, recent research proposes the use of a model-driven engineering approach to spreadsheets. In this paper we conduct the first empirical study to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach. A set of spreadsheet end users worked with two different...

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Abstract: Context. Many safety-critical systems are subject to safety certification as a way of providing assurance that these systems cannot unduly harm people, property or the environment. Creating the requisite evidence for certification can be a challenging task due to the sheer size of the textual standards based on which certification is performed and the amenability of these standards to...

Although these early languages and platforms raised the level of abstraction, they still had a distinct "computing-oriented" focus. In particular, they provided abstractions of the solution space—that is, the domain of computing technologies themselves—rather than abstractions of the problem space that express designs in terms of concepts in application domains, such as telecom, aerospace, heal...

In many large organizations, the model transformations allowing the engineers to more or less automatically go from platformindependent models (PIM) to platform-specific models (PSM) are increasingly seen as vital assets. As tools evolve, it is critical that these transformations are not prisoners of a given CASE tool. Considering in this paper that a CASE tool can be seen as a platform for pro...

Within the domain of information systems, one of the main technological moves we may presently observe in industrial circles is the paradigm shift from object composition to model transformation. This is happening at a very fast pace. Among the concrete signs of this evolution one may mention the ongoing change at the Object Management Group from OMA (Object Management Architecture) to MDA (Mod...