A variety of business and market drivers have lead to explosive growth in the complexity and frequency of use of electronic controls in engineered products. With this growth, Model-Based System Development (MBSD) is now practiced by large groups of engineers, distributed across organizations and geographies. In this context, the ability to do concurrent engineering, distributed development and model reuse are major enablers for effective and efficient use of MBSD processes in large organizations.

As the complexity of systems that are being handled by the engineering community increases, so does the need to understand complex systems in terms of simpler abstractions and to perform analysis using these abstractions. There has been a growing need within the user community for a commercial, unifying tool that supports reusability and re-configurability of an enterprise-wide knowledgebase captured in the form of computer models. Integrated Model Environment (IME) addresses these needs and enables a seamless toolchain to manage the complete life cycle of MBSD work products.

IME extracts architectural information and other relevant meta-data from native models and archives it in a tool-neutral fashion. This facilitates rendering of the architectures in a convenient and common fashion through the IME GUI and enables sharing and mining of this information across the enterprise.  IME also enables the user to create architectures without reference to a specific modeling platform and subsequently populate or associate the architecture with appropriate models in the native domain.  This enables a wide variety of analysis and visualization activities to be performed during the development of a complex system through the same GUI, irrespective of the native format. Variant management of models and data allows re-usability and re-configurability of existing knowledge. Architectures can be exported back to the native tool either as shell architectures or as a composition of existing native models. The client-server architecture of IME supports multi-player collaboration in a distributed development environment.

Capabilities

• Model and data variant management
• Model parameterization
• Tool-neutral data manipulation
• Intelligent data mining

• Architecture analysis
  
• Impact analysis
• Invariance analysis
• Compatibility analysis
• Architecture extraction
• Advanced visualization
• Model assembly
• Architecture creation
• Model composition

• User authentication and access control
• Change management / version control
• Database support