A Software Factory for the Generation of CAPE-OPEN Compliant Process Modelling Components'

The maintenance of CAPE-OPEN compliant process modelling components is a complex task. It requires accurate knowledge about three interconnected domains: the process itself, the CAPE-OPEN interfaces specification, and the middleware (COM, CORBA, and. NET). Consequently, maintenance tasks require the collaboration of several experts throughout the entire component lifecycle. Tools that assist experts in performing these tasks are thus required. This paper presents a tool that embeds enough knowledge about these three aspects, to automatically generate compliant code. Our approach is a software factory that takes as inputs three separated models describing: the process modelling component, the standard specification, and the middleware. These models are combined and refined using successive model transformations, until code is generated. In order to anticipate the evolution of the three domains, transformations are expressed on stable abstractions with respect to expected changes.