Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Contracts with Industry

Three technology transfer contracts with software companies were signed this year.

Steria

A first collaboration with Steria Ouest (located in Nantes) is resulting from the presentation of our activities during one of their regular Board of Architects meeting. The identified objective of this initial joint action was to guide and advice them to migrate an internal legacy application to model driven approach and related technologies, relying on our expertise about modeling and the Eclipse ecosystem. This has notably allowed us to get useful feedback on the benefits and drawbacks currently encountered when applying MDE and associated techniques in the context of real applications.

MIA-Software

Since several years, AtlandMod and Mia-Software are actively collaborating around the topic of Model Driven Reverse Engineering (MDRE), i.e.; the combined use of different model-based techniques to solve real reverse engineering problems. This has resulted in the successful creation and development of two open source Eclipse projects, namely Eclipse-MDT MoDisco (providing a generic and extensible MDRE framework) and Eclipse-EMFT EMF Facet (providing a dynamic model extension framework), both reaching today an industrial maturity level.

However, for these technologies to be definitely adopted and deployed in the context of very large systems handling huge data volumes, some remaining scalability issues still have to be addressed. Thus, scalability of model-driven techniques is one of the main challenges MDE is facing right now. In this context, AtlanMod has joined forces with MIA-Software as part of an Inria technology transfer action. This initiative is devoted to the development of new generation MDE techniques, for model creation and general handling, that effectively scale up. Among the different research challenges behind the MDE scalability and performance improvement, the following ones have been explored in the context of this collaborative action:

• Model random access. Advanced use of on-demand lazy loading techniques;

• Model clustering and slicing. Advanced use of semantic grouping and partial loading techniques;

• Model virtualization. Transparent and on-demand access to different views on a same model;

• Lazy evaluation of model transformation. On-demand lazy execution of transformations;

• Incremental model transformation. Partial model access and transformation execution;

• Multi-threaded model transformation. Parallelization of both model accesses and rule executions.

WebRatio

AtlanMod has helped WebRatio and the University of Trento in the definition (to be provided as an answer to the corresponding OMG RFP) of IFML, a modeling language for designing user interaction flows (not limited to the Web). Such a language should be: Extremely compact (no useless overhead), Effective (allows to model exactly what users want), Efficient (grants high reusability of model fragments), Easy to learn (very low learning curve), Comprehensive (covers most of the user interaction needs), Open and extensible (for covering any ad-hoc logic) and Platform independent (addressing any type of user interface device).

For more information about IFML - Interaction Flow Modeling Language see (http://www.ifml.org/ ).