UML&AADL 2007 Grand Challenges

On today’s sharply competitive industrial market, engineers must focus on their core competencies to produce ever more innovative products, while also reducing development times and costs. This has further heightened the complexity of the development process. At the same time, industrial systems, and specifically real-time embedded systems, have become increasingly software-intensive. New software development approaches and methods must therefore be found to free engineers from the even more complex technical constraints of development and to enable them to concentrate on their core business specialties. One emerging solution is to foster model-based development by defining modeling artifacts well-suited to their domain concerns instead of asking them to write code. However, model-driven approaches will be solutions to the previous issues only if models evolves from a contemplative role to a productive role within the development processes. In this context, model transformation is a key design paradigm that will foster this revolution. This paper is the result of discussions and exchanges that took place within the second edition of the workshop “UML&AADL” (http://www.artist-embedded.org/artist/Topics.html) that was held in 2007 in Auckland, New Zealand, in conjunction with the ICECCS07 conference. The purpose of this workshop was to gather people of both communities from UML (including its domain specific extensions, with a focus on MARTE) and AADL (including its annexes) in order to foster sharing of results and experiments. More specially this year, the focus was on how both standards do subscribe to the model driven engineering paradigm, or to be more precise, how MDE may ease and foster the usage of both sets of standards for developing real-time embedded systems. This paper will show that, even if the work is not yet finished, the current results seems to be already very promising.status: publishe