Features

ModelBus is concerned with the improvement of your model-driven development environment and processes. ModelBus’s key features are

Automation of development tasks

To increase the efficiency of your development processes it is vital to reduce the amount of manual developer intervention needed and to introduce as much automation as possible. For this purpose ModelBus allows you to define single tasks (e.g. guideline checking) as modeling services and to orchestrate them together with other modeling services. These orchestrations can be run automatically triggered either by user commands or by other orchestrations.

Inbuilt and transparent model management

Developers working with models in a development process often complain about a lack of integration and missing or inappropriate handling of modeling artifacts. “I simply want to use models, and I do not want to care about where they come from and where they go to.” ModelBus supports a straightforward mechanism for model identification, which allows easy access to the right model from each of the connected modeling tools.

Support of large and complex models

One of the major problems when dealing with complex models is to keep track of all incoming and outgoing references (e.g. profiled UML models or diagram models). As models grow larger and larger it becomes more and more difficult to coordinate the workflow in a way that permits concurrent work on different parts of a model. ModelBus addresses this challenge with a built-in model repository, which is able to version models, supports the partial check-out of models and coordinates the merging of model versions and model fragments. Moreover, the ModelBus notification system can be used to stay informed about the changes applied to a model by other developers.

Distributed and heterogeneous

In large and possibly distributed development teams maintaining a conglomerate of different analysis, development, and documentation tools quickly becomes difficult. Especially tools performing operations on models (e.g. model transformations) have to be always kept up-to-date for all members of an engineering team to ensure consistent work. Using an extensible IDE does only partially do the job. ModelBus allows the integration of heterogeneous tools covering the whole development lifecycle and comprising custom-made, proprietary tools as well as COTS tools. Tools are connected to ModelBus with the help of specific adapters which are responsible for translating tool specifics into a format known to ModelBus and realize the distributed communication between the tool and the rest of the platform.

Built on industry standards

ModelBus is built on industry standards such as: Web Services (Axis2), BPMN, BPEL, OMG standards OCL, UML, MOF(EMF) as well as JMS.

Extensible and customizable

ModelBus is a flexible and open solution. A number of tool adapters are already available (see adapter list). The set of ModelBus-connected tools can be extended by developing corresponding ModelBus adapters. ModelBus can be used in any kind of development environment. The organization, the execution and the control of the development process is customizable and can be fitted into existing procedures.