This summary has been written by Niko Stotz. A great many thanks go out to him for his efforts!

The slides can be found on the MPS Day 2019 Eindhoven page (further down as part of the program).

The first MPS Day in Eindhoven was a big success: About 60 people got inspired by real-world use-cases of JetBrains MPS by speakers of itemis, Belastingdienst, Océ, Siemens PLM Software, and TU/e. After a great dinner Markus Völter continued with live coding, so everybody got a first-hand impression how development in this language workbench actually works. Members of renowned Brainport region companies and universities enjoyed discussing the state-of-the-art, industry-quality modeling environment.

The 50 available seats were gone in less than three weeks. On Wednesday, March 20, we met at the Altran office in Eindhoven after lunch.

We were lucky to have an opening keynote by Markus Völter (itemis), the most prominent face in the MPS community. He summarized new developments in the MPS ecosystem. Among others, he mentioned

Afterwards, we learned that everybody working in Netherlands is kind of an MPS user: Joris van Aart of Belastingdienst explained that all rules of Dutch income tax are formalized using MPS. These formal models are the base for the actual calculation. MPS allows to experience the provisional effects of any change to the calculation rules live – to a degree that the legal and tax experts at Belastingdienst didn’t believe that would be possible!

Eugen Schindler showed how Océ introduced models in different areas of research & development and diagnostics, and highlighted the impressive benefits of combining these different models.

Siemens PLM Software offers the commercial product Simcenter Embedded Software Designer, based on MPS. Yuri Durodié and Sanjit Mishra gave a live demonstration of implementing pre- and post-conditions of controller logic, and how ESD can verify them including counter-examples. They explained how MPS enabled this functionality unlike other platforms.

As closing keynote of the presentation part, Mark van den Brand (professor at TU/e) reflected the dangers of creating tomorrow’s legacy software with modeling techniques, and how to avoid this threat.

After a nice dinner we met again for the practical part of the event: Markus Völter showed how we actually develop with MPS. He implemented live parts of his advanced introduction to MPS course. The audience engaged with lots of questions and got a solid impression of the ways MPS works.

The lively discussions after every session and during every break proved the interest and possibilities we see in MPS. In fact, there are already ideas about a follow-up event. We’ll keep you posted.

Us organizers (Hristina Moneva, Eugen Schindler, Niko Stotz) wish to thank all participants for their interest and especially the speakers for providing the core of the workshop. We’re grateful for the support of Océ, JetBrains, and Altran.