Architecture for the ImPaKT project is taking shape

A key objective of the joint project, which is headed up by the Heinz Nixdorf Institute at the University of Paderborn, is to develop a reference architecture for end-to-end model-based system development. In order to gear this reference architecture to the requirements of real-life applications, the project partners first conducted a market survey of existing system and process landscapes in the companies. They were particularly interested in the question of which IT systems the companies use to support their change processes and perform MBSE and how they exchange data across company boundaries.

The survey indicated that MBSE has not yet become widely established in small and mid-sized mechanical engineering companies, which is hardly surprising. At larger companies in the automotive industry, on the other hand, a number of initiatives are being launched, often in the context of validating autonomous driving functions. This makes considerable demands on cross-domain collaboration in terms of making dependencies manageable when changes are made.

The project partners have now started defining a generic architectural model which, among other things, links the MBSE artifacts from CAMEO to the PLM structures and establishes the dependencies between the components of the model, thus ensuring traceability. This model will then be implemented and instantiated in the corresponding software solutions in order to test it together with the industry partners.