OPEES

Innovation and collaboration in the MBSE tooling ecosystem

Three of the noteworthy projects that evolved inside PolarSys are Papyrus, Capella and OpenCert.

Papyrus had been established as an Eclipse project in 2008, prior to the launch of the OPEES project. Aspects of project development were brought under the umbrella of OPEES, and after the project, Papyrus development continued via the collaboration of several industrials led by Ericsson. The main rationale behind this support was the need for an industrial platform supporting UML, that was customisable and extensible to allow innovation and collaboration. And again, open source technologies seemed to be superior to proprietary closed tools in terms of extensibility and creation of an ecosystem.

Capella, an MBSE tool based on the Arcadia methodology, was launched in the late 2006 as an internal tool at Thales. By 2013, however, and thanks to their participation in OPEES, Thales realised that the closed nature of the tooling was an obstacle to larger deployment, especially with an extended supply chain, because subcontractors did not have access to the tool due to its proprietary nature. In 2014, the Capella open source project was created in PolarSys with the goals of lowering the barriers to use and of fostering collaboration. In subsequent years, Capella has been applied in industries such as Aerospace, Automotive, Defence, Energy and Railway. A few years later, there are not only thousands of users of Capella on hundreds of projects inside Thales, but also more than a hundred companies worldwide using it, including European organisations such as the European Space Agency, Ariane Group, Rolls Royce and Siemens, that rely on Capella in their System Modelling Workbench product. Finally, it supports an ecosystem of European SMEs, like Obeo and Artal, that sell packaged products, support and expertise on top of Capella not only in Europe, but also in North America and in China.

A blueprint for industry collaboration in open source

The principles for industry collaboration through open source, as developed in OPEES, continue to be used in a range of successful Working Groups hosted by the Eclipse Foundation. This governance model has proven to be adaptable in many different contexts and industries, with goals ranging from simple collaboration amongst stakeholders to more advanced collaboration through focused development co-funding.

Open source as a catalyst for dissemination

Another aspect originating in OPEES is the use of Open source as a catalyst for the dissemination of research results. After this approach was pioneered by OPEES at Eclipse, the AMASS project followed with the open source OpenCert, along with others such as Amalthea4public and Eclipse APP4MC, APPSTACLE and Eclipse Kuksa. All use the same approach that leverages open source for the dissemination and exploitation of research results and encourages the development and sustainability of these technology communities.

OpenCert was created in late 2015 by Tecnalia, another partner of the OPEES project, and other partners from the OpenCOSS (FP7) and AMASS (ECSEL) projects. The goal of OpenCert was to create an open source platform for safety and security assurance project management, assurance case management and evidence management while integrating other projects like Papyrus and CHESS for System Design and Analysis. This project focused on model-based safety and security engineering conformant to ISO 26262, ECSS 40 and other standards. Following the pattern originating with OPEES, the OpenCert stakeholders created an ecosystem to gather research institutes, software vendors, and users around the results of several research projects.