Model Driven Architectures promise to overcome today's system integration and interoperability problems resulting from different used software infrastructures, from different non-interoperable techniques for software development, from different data models and from system and integration difficulties. More and more such architectures and approaches are publicly announced that claim to be the silver bullet solving all the issues the E-Business age rises. Among them are OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) including technologies such as the Unified Modelling Language 2.0, the Meta Object Facility, the Common Warehouse Metamodel and obviously CORBA and CORBA Components. But also the Java Business Intelligence Architecture, the Java Metadata Interface and Enterprise Java Beans play a significant role in that arena. Beside those, Microsoft tries to get a large piece of the cake by developing - and standardizing - the .net architecture. There are also other players like Oracle, and BEA that target the E-business market with their proprietary products.
Software infrastructures for distributed systems come and go, each claiming to be the only open architecture; the most flexible and only long term solution. Model driven architectures claim the same - at a much higher level of abstraction - they promise to serve as the integrated environment for system design, construction and integration. Most of such architectures are stemming from the Internet domain, such as the Java Business Intelligence Architecture or the .net approach. The question that needs to be answered soon is whether or not and to what extend such approaches can be applied in the telecom domain as well? A positive answer to that question together with guidelines on technology usage, methodology recommendations and in-depth application studies as proposed by this project will significantly improve the business opportunities of organisations applying these techniques, in terms of reduced time and costs needed to develop new components, to integrate them with legacy systems, to model, analyse and optimise business processes and to integrate B2B and B2C systems implemented with different data models.
MDA will empower end users and businesses by allowing them to participate more actively in developing telecommunications software solutions that address their business problems. Telecom services have traditionally been developed for customer groups. They have not been tailorable to the needs of single users and businesses. MDA, with the application of conceptual modelling tools such as UML, allows end users to participate more actively in developing telecom services.
MDA is a rather young approach and is kept intentionally very abstract, so that it is applicable in several domain and problem spaces. An abstract framework needs to be specialized for each domain and problem space, and a methodology has to be developed that explains the application of the MDA in specific domains.
This is exactly the focus of the MODA-TEL project, which aims to develop a methodology for the application of MDA concepts in the telecommunication domain, including the development of tools to support development and operation of telecommunications software. The availability of such methodology and tools will be beneficial to all players:
Moreover, the project will recommend standards, technologies and products, which promise to overcome today's system integration problems resulting from different used infrastructures and techniques for software development and integration. Addressing this aspect, it is required to perform the project as a collaborative work.