Reusable event types for models at runtime to support the examination of runtime phenomena

Today's software is getting more and more complex and harder to understand. Models help to organize knowledge and emphasize the structure of a software at a higher abstraction level. While the usage of model-driven techniques is widely adopted during software construction, it is still an open research topic if models can also be used to make runtime phenomena more comprehensible as well. It is not obvious which models are suitable for manual analysis and which model elements can be related to what type of runtime events. This paper proposes a collection of runtime event types that can be reused for various systems and meta-models. Based on these event types, information can be derived which help human observers to assess the current system state. Our approach is applied in a case study and evaluated regarding generalisability and completeness by relating it to two different meta-models.