Model-Based System Engineering in Practice: Document Generation - MegaM@Rt2 Project Experience

MegaM@Rt2 project is a collaborative initiative of the ECSEL Joint Undertaking under Horizon 2020 EU programme. The project regroups 26 partners from 6 different European countries who jointly address challenges of engineering modern cyber-physical systems by using model-based engineering methods. Since it is a model-based project, we adopted a similar approach for dealing with requirements analysis, architecture, design, roadmap planning and development status checking. In these tasks, document generation methods were particularly useful to create a set of "live" reference specifications and contractual reports. We believe that these methods perfectly demonstrate relevant benefits of the model-based approach and are applicable to many other contexts. Document generation has several challenges, since the produced documents should address several goals and target different audience. Hence, we describe this approach in detail in this paper in the form of an experience report.

In essence, the MegaM@Rt2 project had a rather trivial task to document inception phase of the project. The challenge arises from the scale of the project, we had to deal with hundreds of requirements from completely different users, hundreds of features of 29 tools, which had to be mapped to those requirements in order to analyze a gap and devise a roadmap for a consistent tool chain. With limited resource on technical coordination we had to be extremely efficient and thus we adopted a model-based approach that we describe in this paper. The paper should be helpful to project managers and architects who wish to discuss on model-based approaches from a practical side.