An Enterprise Ontology based approach to Model-Driven Engineering

Abstract

Because of the lack of a significant increase of productivity in the last 20 years we are still in a huge need for increasing the return a company derives from its software development effort. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) aims to raise the level of abstraction in application modeling and increase automation in application development, thereby increasing the productivity in software development. The Model-Driven Architecture tries to define an MDE approach, but is mainly focused on technical variability and lacks formalism. Other approaches, using Domain-Specific Languages, do not define a process or framework at all. Research in this area is focused on language engineering and multi-modeling. Literature on formalizing MDE is focused on defining the concepts and assets needed to construct an MDE framework. We only know one attempt on formulating an end-to-end (from business model to IT implementation) MDE approach, but the resulting framework does not have a theoretical foundation. Concluding we can state that no end-to-end MDE approach exists describing abstraction layers, models, modeling languages, and transformations, based on a formal, theoretical foundation. This thesis presents an MDE approach based on a sound theoretical foundation, providing end-to-end guidance to refine and transform an organization model into an IT system supporting that organization.