On a tool-supported model-based approach for building architectures and roadmaps: The MegaM@Rt2 project experience

MegaM@Rt2 is a large European project dedicated to the provisioning of a model-based methodology and supporting tooling for system engineering at a wide scale. It notably targets the continuous development and runtime validation of such complex systems by developing a framework addressing a large set of engineering processes and application domains. This collaborative project involves 27 partners from 6 different countries, 9 industrial case studies as well as over 30 different software tools from project partners (and others). In the context of the MegaM@Rt2 project, we elaborated on a pragmatic model-driven approach to specify the case study requirements, design the high-level architecture of a framework, perform the gap analysis between the industrial needs and current state-of-the-art, and plan a first framework development roadmap accordingly. The present paper describes the generic tool-supported approach that came out as a result. It also details its concrete application in the MegaM@Rt2 project. In particular, we discuss the collaborative modeling process, the requirement definition tooling, the approach for components modeling, as well as the traceability and document generation. In addition, we show how we used the proposed solution to specify the MegaM@Rt2 framework’s conceptual tool components centered around three complementary tool sets: the MegaM@Rt2 System Engineering Tool Set, the MegaM@Rt2 Runtime Analysis Tool Set and the MegaM@Rt2 Model & Traceability Management Tool Set. The paper ends with a discussion on the practical lessons we have learned from this work so far.