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Workshop on industrial
applications of Model Driven Architecture
The telecommunications industry is about to experience a tremendous shift in the way complex software systems are constructed, deployed and operated. This is one of the main conclusions from the “First European Workshop on Model Driven Architecture with Emphasis on Industrial Applications” that took place in Enschede, The Netherlands, on 17-18 March 2004. The workshop was jointly organised by Eurescom, the University of Twente and the European Software Institute to give the opportunity to industry experts and research scientists to exchange their opinions about the state of development in this area. In his opening speech Prof. C.A. Vissers, Scientific Director of the 'Telematica Instituut' briefly examined the historical evolution of software engineering and reminded the audience that there is still a long way to go to fulfil all the promises technology makes. In his keynote on the first day of the workshop, Dr. Richard Soley from the Object Management Group (OMG) provided an overview of the current standardisation of the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) in the OMG and gave a number of examples of successful application of the technology in different industries.
Industry sectors The workshop was attended by more than 65 participants who discussed with great interest the potential of the technology in telecommunications and various other industrial fields, such as air traffic control and the automotive industry. During the workshop, 18 papers were presented, which had been selected among 35 papers through a peer review process, covering a wide field of application of the MDA technology. Many contributions were prompted through the large expert network that the two IST projects MODA-TEL and MASTER, both investigating the application of the model driven architecture in an industrial context, have built. The industrial relevance of the MDA technology was evident by the large number of industry players who contributed to and participated in the workshop, such as T-Systems, BT Exact, Thales, Siemens, France Télécom, and Computas. In addition, the research and academic contributions were well received and the presented work demonstrated market relevance, since most of the presented work was conducted in collaboration with the industry. This was for example the case for the work presented by Fraunhofer FOKUS, the Carnegie Mellon University, the Technical University of Berlin, the Vanderbilt University, and the University of Twente. In his keynote on the second day of the workshop, Prof. Rolv Bræk from the University of Trondheim reminded the audience that the industry and especially telecommunications have a longer history in formal design and modelling of complex software systems. The wide adoption of these methods was not possible due to lack of expertise and easy-to-use tools, restricting its use to a small community. However, it looks like the time is ripe to widely adopt formal design and modelling for software construction. In addition, the fact that there exists a wide industry consensus will lead to numerous supporting tools. Conclusion At a concluding panel discussion, the panellists expressed their expectations with respect to MDA at different levels. Extrapolating from the presented experience of effective application of the technology in large, complex systems such as telecom billing applications, operations support systems, and air traffic control, the experts formulated ambitious expectations. For example, Thales is expecting MDA to contribute to systems engineering as a whole, rather than only to software engineering. In contrast, BTexact expects MDA to help implementing also tactical solutions in a very rapid way. However, one of the most important conclusions was that MDA as a concept must be supported by industry strength tools supporting a much wider systems life-cycle, ranging from requirements gathering up to deployment, operations and maintenance of the systems. More information is available at http://modeldrivenarchitecture.esi.es/mda_workshop.html Follow-on The “Second European Workshop on Model Driven Architecture with an Emphasis on Methodologies and Transformations” will be held at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, on 7-8 September 2004. More information is
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