Complex systems are hard to define. Nevertheless they are more and more
frequently encountered. Examples include a worldwide airline traffic management
system, a global telecommunication or energy infrastructure or even the whole
legacy portfolio accumulated for more than thirty years in a large insurance
company. There are currently few engineering methods and tools to deal with
them in practice. The purpose of this Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop on Model
Engineering for Complex Systems was to study the applicability of Model Driven
Engineering (MDE) to the development and management of complex systems. MDE is
a software engineering field based on few simple and sound principles. Its
power stems from the assumption of considering everything - engineering
artefacts, manipulations of artefacts, etc - as a model. Our intuition was that
MDE may provide the right level of abstraction to move the study of complex
systems from an informal goal to more concrete grounds. In order to provide
first evidence in support of this intuition, the workshop studied different
visions and different approaches to the development and management of different
kinds of complex systems. This note presents the summary of the discussions.