Seamless Model-Driven Development Put into Practice

Model-driven development (MDD) today is the most promising approach to handle the complexity of software development for distributed embedded systems. Still, no single tool-chain exists that meets all needs of companies employing MDD. Moving back and forth between the tools in today's iterative development processes thus requires manual integration steps, which are error-prone and hamper reuse and refinement of models. A possible workaround is developing adapters for each pair of tools. Despite its large overhead, industry started pursuing this approach because of a lack of better alternatives. A proper solution is a tool-chain building on an integrated modeling language. We have realized this in cooperation with BMW Research and Technology. To increase the degree of automation during development, the modeling language builds upon a core featuring a rigorous semantics. This enables automatic analysis, facilitating an automatic transition from model-based designs to a distributed system running on the target platform.