Eric Cariou

I am assistant professor at the computer science department of "UFR Sciences et Techniques" of the Université de Bretagne Occidentale (Brest, France) and member of the laboratory Lab-STICC UMR 6285, team P4S.

My research specialty is software engineering, and more specifically model-driven engineering and software architecture. I am currently working on the usage of executable models for software development.

I am teaching in bachelor and master degrees, in the field of software engineering (object-oriented and Web development, model-driven engineering, distributed systems).

I passed the french "habilitation à diriger des recherches" in March 2026.

Contact : eric.cariou@univ-brest.fr 		Ma photo

Former positions:
2004-2022 : assistant professor at the computer science department of the university of Pau, head of the Software Engineering team of the LIUPPA
2003-2004 : post-doctorate position in the GOAL team of LIFL (now CRIStAL)
1999-2003 : PhD student at the computer science department of the ENST Bretagne (now IMT Atlantique) and in the Triskell team of IRISA

Teaching (in french)

Enseignements – université de Brest

Anciens enseignements – université de Pau

Responsable des cours, université de Pau :

Enseignements extérieurs, en collaboration avec l'université de Pau :

Autres :

Research

My research interests are in the software engineering field and more precisely on these subjects:

  • Model-driven engineering (MDE):
    • Weawing of business operations into executable models
    • Model execution adaptation
    • Verification by contracts for model transformation and execution
  • Software architecture:
    • Integration of component and agent approaches through services
    • Communication components
 Keywords
Word cloud based on titles of the undermentioned selected papers

Weaving of business operations into executable models. Within MDE, an executable model defines the behavior of a software system. The executable model is the same as the one defined during the specification stage, thus eliminating the gap between design and implementation. Our work focuses on the definition of these executable models and more particularly on how to weave into these models business operations implemented in standard programming languages (Java for instance).
[Main publications and tools]

Model execution adaptation. MDE has shown its interest for software adaptation thanks to models@runtime which is based on the principle to have at runtime a model that reflects the state of the running system and to reason about the need of system adaptation from this model. In a context of model execution, the model becomes by principle the running system. In this case, the idea is to directly adapt the executed model. The PhD of Samson Pierre (2012-2015) aimed to study this adaptation of model execution.
[Main publications]

Verification by contracts in MDE. During my post-doctorate position at the LIFL, I defined the concept of model transformation contract. When I arrived at the University of Pau, I restarted working on these contracts by developing a tool to facilitate their implementation for the EMF platform. They were also adapted to verify model execution and model execution adaptation. This work has continuing with the PhD of Meriem Lahrouni (2012-2018) at the Faculty of Sciences Semlalia of Marrakech, Morocco.
[Main publications and tools]

Integration of component and agent approaches. I was co-advisor of the PhD of Nour Aboud (2008-2012) whose goal was to integrate component and agent approaches via services. The global idea is to define applications simultaneously with interoperating components and agents and to be able to use the characteristics of an approach for the elements of the other approach (agents in composite structures of components, agent high-level interactions used by components, ...). Services are used as pivot of interoperability between components and agents.
[Main publications]

Communication components. In June 2003, I defended at the University of Rennes 1 and at the ENST Bretagne my PhD thesis called Contribution to a Process of Communication Abstraction Reification. In this thesis, I propose a process enabling the manipulation of a communication abstraction under the form of a software component (a communication component or medium) from its abstract specification to its implementation(s). Throughout the whole software process, the reified communication abstraction remains the same. The interest of these communication components is to easily reuse communication abstractions and to define substitutable implementation variants of them.
[Main publications]

Publications

Here are the main publications associated with the research subjects presented above.

For the complete list of my publications:

Weaving of business operations into executable models

Model execution adaptation

In addition, the PhD thesis of Samson Pierre at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour (november 2015) : Adaptation logicielle pour et par les i-DSML (in french).

Contracts for Model-Driven Engineering

Tools and examples presented in the OCL'09 workshop and ECMFA'11 papers are available here.

Integration of agent and component approaches through services

In addition, the PhD thesis of Nour Aboud at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour (december 2012) : Service-Oriented Integration of Component and Organizational MultiAgent Models.

Communication components

Eric Cariou - Last modification : 05/01/2025