MOMOCS - Project Story

MOMOCS aims at studying a methodology and related tools for fast reengineering complex systems. The project is studying how to solve the dilemma between rigorous methodologies and agile and unstructured one, allowing the modernisation engineer to concentrate on what to do and not how to do it.

At A Glance: MOMOCS

MOdel driven MOdernisation of Complex Systems

Project Coordinator
Alessandra Bagnato
TXT e-solutions S.p.A
Phone: +39 010 4610368
Fax: +39 010 4610377
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Project website: http://www.momocs.org

Partners: TXT e-solutions S.p.A. (IT), Johan Wolfgang Goethe-Üniversität (DE), Politecnico di Milano (IT), Softeam (FR), Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo (ES), D'Appolonia (IT), Atos Origin (ES), Siemens AG (DE), SIGS-DATACOM GmbH (DE)

Duration: September, 2006 - August, 2008

Project funding (EC/total): €2.23m/€4.16m

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MOMOCS aims at studying a methodology and related tools for fast reengineering of complex systems. A complex system is characterised by an interconnection of hardware, software, user interfaces, firmware, business and production processes. The project will study how a complex system can be modernised with a focus on the software portion of it, with the

The methodology studied in MOMOCS aims at solving the dilemma between bureaucratic methodologies and agile ones.

goal of keeping up with a very fast changing business and technical environment taking human beings as the centre of the interaction. MOMOCS will thus allow the end-user to concentrate on what to do and not how to do it. The methodology studied in the project aims at solving the dilemma between rigorous and bureaucratic methodologies and agile and unstructured ones by building an eXtreme end-User dRiven Process, which will be named XIRUP, and related supporting tools. MOMOCS modernisation methodology will apply to complex systems and will reengineer software architectures, data heterogeneities and processes in order to make systems behaviour more predictable in terms of performance, stability and upgradeability. MOMOCS methodology and supporting tools will leverage on standards from OMG and other standardisation bodies and will be fully open.

Project Rationale

EU is facing a dilemma, in spite of having excellent basic research and theoretic foundations, winning ideas like the WWW and Linux, strong industries like telecommunications and automation is loosing ground to competition towards Asia and fails to challenge US dominion in industrial basic software like OS, middleware and development platforms. Often European companies fail to grab innovation coming from basic research due to excessive bureaucratic approach. These modernisation efforts makes evident that the normal design and model approach for software is first a complete process analysis and secondly the software analysis starting from the results of the former analysis and the software constraints.

European-wide benefits

The wide adoption of modernisation techniques will provide several benefits to the EU, being a mean for a reducing industrial cost to EU and also a catalyser for the industry transformation, by encouraging componentisation of systems but also promoting standardisation among the different stakeholders. The development of a rigorous and agile modernisation methodology and related tools will spread modernisation and reuse of systems instead of development of brand new system thus reducing costs of production which may be reflected also on the market making EU products more competitive on the global market. MOMOCS project will thus foster the adoption of standards by seeking contacts with the OMG and other relevant standardisation bodies. This will allow existing systems architectures to be modelled in a standard and expressive meta-language transformed to new target architectures in order to better meet industrial requirements

MOMOCS approach

MOMOCS approach consists of a model-centric description of a complex system that can be described as the interaction of three macro systems:

data, which are figures, characters, bitmaps, coded processes that are processed by a system. They can be stored in data repositories, digital archives, ontologies, files or any other medium. Data are accessed through data sources interfaces.
*ware, which is software, hardware, firmware, process ware or any other "ware" that constitute the mean through which a system processes data in order to perform tasks and elaborations.
process, which is a very broad concept. A process is a designed sequence of tasks and can be oriented to technology, business, and behaviour. A process constitutes the instruction through which *ware can elaborate data in order to perform a specific task.

MOMOCS methodology will consist of a fast iterative approach that will attempt to model a complex system, simulate its behaviour and modernisation and deploy it to a specific environment. System continuity and coherence will be assured by continuous gap analysis that will highlight differences between real system, model and modernised system in order to avoid criticalities and wrong assumptions.

Modernisation tools for everybody

MOMOCS modernisation tools will be open and present a single Integrated Modernisation Environment though which it will be possible to access its three main components, namely:

Data modernisation tool, which aims at modernising in terms of structure and semantics the data layer of a complex system
*ware modernisation tool, which aims at modernising of a complex system in terms of user-friendliness of the interfaces, componentisation and robustness of architectural design
Process modernisation tool, which aims at modernising the logical flow of the complex system in terms of optimisation of system process, business process re-engineering and responsiveness of the overall complex system

project

Having chosen the open-source paradigm and well supported and largely adopted frameworks such as Eclipse will help the widely dissemination and adoption of the MOMOCS modernisation tools.

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