Preface to 2nd International Workshop on Multi-Paradigm Modeling for Cyber-Physical Systems (MPM4CPS 2020)

Tackling the complexity involved in developing truly complex, designed systems is a topic of intense research and development. Systems complexity has drastically increased once software components were introduced in the form of embedded systems, controlling physical parts of the system, and has grown into Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), where the networking aspect of the systems and their environment are of specific interest. The complexity faced when engineering CPSs is mostly due to the plethora of cross-disciplinary design alternatives and inter-domain interactions. To date, no unifying theory nor system design methods, techniques, or tools to design, analyze, and ultimately deploy CPSs exist. Individual (physical systems, software, and network) engineering disciplines offer only partial solutions and do not match for the complexity observed in CPS. Multi-Paradigm Modeling (MPM) offers a foundational framework for gluing the various required disciplines together in a consistent way. The inherent complexity of CPSs is broken down by specifying each aspect of the system at the most appropriate level of abstraction, which allows for the modelling of different views on the system, each expressed in appropriate modeling formalisms. MPM offers processes and tools that can combine, couple, and integrate each of the views that compose a system. MPM encompasses many research topics - from language engineering (for DSLs, including their (visual) syntax and semantics), to processes to support multi-view and multi-abstraction modeling, simulation for system analysis, and deployment.The added complexity that CPSs bring compared to embedded and software-intensive systems requires looking at these new applications and how MPM techniques can be applied or adapted for them, tying together multiple domains. Many remaining research questions require answers from researchers from different domains, as well as a unified effort from researchers that work on supporting MPM techniques and technologies.