Systematic literature review of the objectives, techniques, kinds, and architectures of models at runtime

In the context of software development, models provide an abstract representation of a software system or a part of it. In the software development process, they are primarily used for documentation and communication purposes in analysis, design, and implementation activities. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) further increases the importance of models, as in MDE models are not only used for documentation and communication, but as central artefacts of the software development process. Various recent research approaches take the idea of using models as central artefacts one step further by using models at runtime to cope with dynamic aspects of ever-changing software and its environment. In this article, we analyze the usage of models at runtime in the existing research literature using the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) research method. The main goals of our SLR are building a common classification and surveying the existing approaches in terms of objectives, techniques, architectures, and kinds of models used in these approaches. The contribution of this article is to provide an overview and classification of current research approaches using models at runtime and to identify research areas not covered by models at runtime so far.