Towards Model-Driven Quantum Software Engineering

Quantum technologies are emerging. Dedicated languages for programming Quantum machines are emerging as well and already used in different settings. Orthogonal to this development, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is explored to ease the development of software systems by applying modeling techniques such as Domain-Specific Modeling Languages and generative techniques such as code generation. In this position paper, we argue for a dedicated research line which deals with the exploration of how MDE may be applied for Quantum technologies. This combination would allow to speed-up the development of Quantum software, open the door for domain experts to utilize Quantum technologies, and may provide an additional abstraction layer over existing Quantum hardware architectures and programming languages. We outline several research challenges which we derived from a demonstration case of how to exploit domain-specific modeling for social network analysis on Quantum technologies.