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Backed by the European Commission, a consortium of 19 industry and academic partners has embarked on a €20 million project to drive the development of tools, processes and standards for model-driven architecture. The project, called ModelWare (modeling solution for software systems) is geared towards addressing the issues of software systems development productivity and next generation software systems engineering methods and tools.
Infrastructure, such as operating systems, middleware and applications, are proliferating in the marketplace. The costs for enhancing and maintaining software, along with the costs of integrating new applications within existing environments, are vastly more than what is required for initial development. Moving design, development and analysis to a higher level of abstraction—one that is platform-independent—is expected to help the software industry keep pace with this expansion.
This move involves developing software models that represent these more complex systems at a platform independent level. Once these new models are in place, platform-specific implementations can be derived with a large degree of automation. In short, this evolution will enable designers to create one piece of software that will run on various systems—all based on a single blueprint-model.
Although model-based efforts have already taken root among selected tool vendors, existing tools are limited to proprietary solutions and rely on many different kinds of models. These tools are not interoperable and don’t follow the same requirements, hence underlining the intense need for a single widely accepted model-driven architecture. The ModelWare project will go a long way toward integrating the various model-based tools and providing a seamless model-based environment for software engineering—from requirements through architectural design, development, maintenance and evolution.
Thales Research and Technology is heading and coordinating the consortium of 19 industrial and academic partners, with Thales and IBM functioning as the two leading partners. The other members include major leaders of software intensive industry firms, tool vendors, academia and consultancy companies based in eight European countries.
Partners in the ModelWare project are active in standards bodies, like Object Management Group (OMG), which were instrumental in initiating the drive for model-driven architecture. These groups are enthusiastic about new standards for model exchange, especially for embedded systems. The consortium also involves many academic partners who are intensifying their efforts in this area by organizing the European conference on model-driven software engineering. The project efforts also include an open source community of industrial users and academic users to support model-based tooling and methodologies.
Early stages of the project will involve analyzing and understanding the current tools and work methodologies used by the industrial partners. This stage will provide a baseline for later measurements. In later stages, scheduled for a year from now, consortium partners will coordinate efforts to apply and implement the new model-driven technologies to their work. At the end of two years, new measurements will be taken to demonstrate the applicability of the ModelWare technology for return on investment.
ModelWare tools will be based on Eclipse, the IBM open, extensible platform for tool integration, which was built by a community of development tool providers.
IBM, partner of the ModelWare Consortium and leader of one of the application areas of the project, also views MDD as an important step in the evolution of software development and has been developing products to meet this. Dr. Alan Hartman, of the IBM Haifa Research Lab, states “The ModelWare project is in complete harmony with the IBM Software Development Platform that offers an open and modular approach to software development supported by technology from our Rational brand. This is an area that IBM believes is essential to the future efficiency, quality, and effectiveness of enterprise software development.”
The IBM Haifa Lab has a special interest in model-based architecture. The lab serves as the IBM Research center of competence for verification technologies and has vast expertise in the area of model-based testing—especially in the hardware domain, where tools such as RuleBase for formal verification and the Genesys test generation platform have been used successfully for several years.
The partners of the ModelWare consortium are: Thales (France), IBM (UK and Israel), Schlumberger WesternGeco (Norway), France Telecom (France), Enabler Informática (Portugal), AS Aprote (Estonia), SOFTEAM (France), SINTEF (Norway), imbus AG (Germany), Adaptive Limited (United Kingdom), INRIA (France), ESI (Spain), Université Pierre et Marie Curie LIP6 (France), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain), University of York (United Kingdom), Fraunhofer FOKUS (Germany) and Zühlke Engineering (Germany).
For further information, please contact the project coordinator at: www.modelware-ist.org
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