Future of MBE/MDE/MDD in the Industry — Open Source is the Only Solution!
Abstract:
Model Based Engineering (MBE) has proven to be highly successful in many different contexts in large software organizations like Ericsson over the last decades. As a result, modeling is now used for a wide range of aspects, including, software design, system modeling, information modeling, network architecture modeling, and business process modeling. However, key issues are currently limiting the broader adoption of MBE in the industry. We believe that the main limiting factors at this point are related to the tools. Main issues include the lack of proper support for customization and DSML development, and the lack of capabilities to support a broad range of development aspects that are considered key by end-users, including testing, tracing and debugging, model checking, deployment on multicore and multi-processor platforms, deployment analysis and validation, design space exploration, variability modeling and product line management, and model / tool integrations. These problems plus the lack of evolution of the commercial tools over the last years has led to conclude that the traditional approach based on proprietary technologies has failed and that we need a new solution based on open source. In this context, the emergence of Papyrus as an industrial-grade open source modeling tool has the potential to be a real game changer as it provides the required basis for the establishment of a new MBE era based on a true collaboration between the industry and the research community. Such collaboration is in our opinion he only way to develop a complete MBE development environment that will provide support for the broad set of capabilities required by end-users.
In this presentation, we discuss: Ericsson's experience with MBE over the last 20 years using commercial proprietary tools; the main motivations and plan for the development of an industrial-strength open source modeling tool solution based on Papyrus; the key importance of establishing a vibrant community composed of end-users, commercial suppliers, and research/academia; the impact of open source on the business model for modeling tool providers; and the main challenges and opportunities for the next years.