CRC 476 IMPROVE
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Subproject I3
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Software Integration and Framework Development
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Project Description of the CRC 476 subproject I3
Concerning development processes in engineering disciplines, nowadays, single engineering activities are supported by specialized, isolated tools based on heterogeneous system platforms, proprietary document formats, and different conceptual models. Typically, the overall development process, i.e. the dependencies between activities and their resulting products, the consistency between products produced by individual activities etc. are not considered by the supporting tools.
This project, which is part of the CRC 476 IMPROVE, deals with the coordination of the software development process for an integrated development environment in chemical engineering. It aims to develop a general framework for a-posteriori integration of existing tools.
Integration is realized by this subproject on the architectural level. An architecture for the integrated environment is being developed on the level of subsystems, where general components are identified. Thereby, a coordinated development and reuse on the product level is enforced. Additionally, we take care off that project-specific components are embedded correctly into the overall system.
The architecture of the overall environment describes the "gluing parts" necessary for performing the integration. It defines for example what kinds of interfaces the tools to be integrated offer, how interfaces are wrapped in order to homogenize them, how tools and wrappers are distributed, how interfaces are accessed via certain middleware techniques and so on.
To make use of existing tools within a tight integrated environment, components, which are called wrappers, have to be provided which make tools available at a clean level suitable for integration. To reduce the development effort for building a wrapper, we study a model-driven software development approach for constructing wrappers: based on a formal meta-model a visual model of the wrapper is specified and the executable code for the wrapper is generated and embedded into the general framework.
The research within the subproject is continued by the TC 61 transfer project T7.
Project Data