Complex Problems

The models and code built to support model-based systems development have increased significantly in their complexity.  It is no longer sufficient for a single engineer to work on a model by themselves, acting as the sole gatekeeper for the source code.  Now, entire teams of engineers often work on a single subsystem model.  Several teams can work in tandem to maintain all the various subsystems of the entire architecture.  Increasingly, these teams are not co-located in a single building.  The development process is now spread across multiple offices, or even across continents.  All this points to the the increase need for rigorous "Model Lifecycle Management".

Simple Solutions

In order to manage such complex projects, version control systems (VCS) have become a necessity.  Using a VCS, engineers can organize their projects into trunks and branches, where the trunk is the main, stable set of models, and each engineer (or each feature) can have its own branch for development and testing.  Once the models in the branches have been validated, then can be merged back to the trunk for all the other engineers to share.

Version control is one of the main strengths of Emmeskay's IME Enterprise Edition.  IME Enterprise Edition comes with a full-featured VCS built into the same interface where architecture management can be performed.  This allows engineers to perform architecture analysis, create their model variants and commit their changes to a central repository - all from one tool.  By having a central repository, each person's working copy is automatically backed up to the repository whenever the commit their changes.  This repository is a searchable database, making it a powerful resource for architecture analysis.  Engineers can query the database to find compatible models for their architecture and retreive files they need from the shared server.

Through our deep experience in model development consulting, Emmeskay understands the importance of Model Lifecycle Management.  This has lead us to develop tools such as IME to support engineers in their model-based system development needs.