Annual Report 2010 - Fachgruppe Informatik an der RWTH Aachen ...

So far we conducted several guided interviews with project managers from different
organizational units of Siemens, located at different sites and concerned with different
domains. The outcomes of these interviews are going to be used to detect the status quo in
modeling and model-driven development at Siemens and to derive assumptions and
hypotheses that will be deeper analyzed in the currently conducted survey.
ModelPlex – MODELing solution for comPLEX software systems
B. Rumpe, M. Schindler, and S. Völkel
In cooperation with 20 partners from 8 countries
Model-driven engineering (MDE) is an approach to Software Engineering that has proven
benefits of cost reduction and quality improvement. Although models can indeed provide the
necessary abstractions that enable human comprehension, communication, simulation and
analysis, and synthesis of implementation artefacts which is the key for complex systems
engineering, applicability still remains a challenge.
The EU-project ModelPlex defines and develops a coherent infrastructure specifically for the
application of MDE to the development and subsequent management of complex systems
within a variety of industrial domains. Therefore, ModelPlex uses established technologies
developed in the preceding ModelWare-project as a basis for providing an enhanced MDE
approach. In addition, new approaches, tools, and technologies are developed and form an
integrated solution for handling complex systems.
ModelPlex is driven by Industrial use cases ensuring the applicability and the integration of
the different technologies produced by the academics and industrial partners. In order to gain
a solution which is usable in different domains and applicable for small and medium
enterprises to global corporations, the ModelPlex-consortium consists of 20 partners with
different backgrounds from 8 countries. Amongst them are SAP, IBM, Telefonica, several
medium-sized companies as well as universities and research institutes from Germany,
France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Belgium, Norway, Spain and Israel.
The main research areas of the Chair for Software Engineering are model composition, model
based testing metrics, and the design of domain specific languages (DSLs).
Model composition is mainly concerned with handling models used to define complex
software systems. We see the compositional style of development as the main instrument to
handle complexity: huge systems should be defined by many small models which can be
handled, understood, and evaluated separately instead of one huge model like it is the case in
tools nowadays. Therefore we provide a semantic basis which clarifies how models can be
defined separately, which interfaces exists between these models, and how these models
interact.
Model based testing is like code testing one possibility to ensure the correctness of the
system. Testing metrics help to evaluate which parts of the systems have (not) been tested.
However, using many languages in order to define different aspects of the system complicates
this approach: different languages have different kinds of metrics which have to be
implemented separately. Therefore, we provide a language-independent framework which can
be used to define metrics based on directed graphs (see Figure 1). This framework
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