Eclipse EATOP

Eclipse EATOP is an infrastructure platform implementation of common base functionality for design tools that enable an effective usage of the architecture description language EAST-ADL in software and systems development.

It includes the following capabilities:

Eclipse EMF based access to the EAST-ADL meta-model

• Tools to generate an XML schema and an Ecore meta-model from the Enterprise Architect sources of the EAST-ADL releases published by the EAST-ADL association.
• EMF-based meta-model implementations of several EAST-ADL releases that provide EAST-ADL design tool developers with Java APIs for manipulating EAST-ADL model instances. EATOP contains for each supported EAST-ADL release the required meta-model implementation. The first supported EAST-ADL releases is the version 2.1.10.

File based as well as database persistency management

• EATOP provides in combination with Sphinx the functionality to serialize and deserialize the instances of the EAST-ADL meta-model within an EAXML file. The EAXML file is kind of a xml file which contains the serialized form of the EAST-ADL meta-model instances. Its content is conform to the xml schema of the corresponding EAST-ADL release.
• Database persistence of EAST-ADL models.
• Management of EAST-ADL models spread over one or multiple XML files in the Eclipse workspace.

Basic Eclipse user interface support

• A wizard for creation of an EAST-ADL project
• A wizard for creation of an EAST-ADL file (.eaxml)
• An EAST-ADL release preference page
• A property page for EAST-ADL projects
• An EATOP perspective
• An EATOP explorer view which shows only EAST-ADL content and the instances of the EAST-ADL objects in an EAST-ADL file
• A property tab which shows the properties of EAST-ADL object instances and allows to modify them
• Undo/Redo functionality
• Drag and drop functionality between EAST-ADL content

To enable a seamless workflow in a development process, interoperability and interfacing with other tools and platforms will be provided

• Bridges between EATOP and Papyrus and synchronization of EMF-based EAST-ADL APIs with UML2 profile based EAST-ADL implementations created with Papyrus.
• Interface to requirements engineering tools (via ReqIF, see Eclipse/RMF),
• Interface to software modeling tools (e.g., via AUTOSAR)
• Interface to other model-based design tools (e.g. Matlab/Simulink)
• Interoperability with domain independent abstractions of EAST-ADL like the CESAR reference technology platform (www.cesarproject.eu), the MBAT reference technology platform (www.mbat-artemis.eu), or PolarSys solution.

Further miscellaneous features will ease the handling of EAST-ADL. Examples are

• Model to model transformation between the different abstraction layers within the EAST-ADL meta-model.
• Variability management supporting both the definition of variant-rich EAST-ADL models as well as creation of fully/partly configured occurrences of these models representing individual variants or variant subsets.

Demonstrators

• A standalone application that can be used to conveniently explore EATOP without an existing Eclipse installation. It demonstrates the features and capabilities of EATOP.
• Experimental (graphical, form based, ...) editors to create and visualize EAST-ADL based models.