Eclipse Capella

Eclipse Capella® is a field-proven model driven engineering solution based on a graphical modeling workbench providing rich methodological guidance and offering high productivity and quality insurance gains for engineers developing systems, software and hardware architectures.

The Capella workbench is a Java / Eclipse RCP application providing a domain-specific language (DSL) implementing Arcadia, both as a simplification and a semantic enrichment of the UML and SysML standards. Its toolset is dedicated to guidance, productivity and quality: Intuitive model editing and viewing capabilities help engineers primarily focus on the design and description of the system and its architecture. This relieves them from the management of the sometimes complex semantics of the UML or SysML modeling languages.

At the core of the Capella workbench is a constantly challenged balance between remaining as simple as possible for the end-users and providing the required expressivity to model complex systems. The following business-focused capabilities are all within the scope of the Capella project:

• Embedded methodological browser, providing a step-by-step workflow and a constant reference to contextual model content.
• Advanced features to manage complexity, including relevant diagram filters, layers, and dynamically computed model graphical simplifications.
• Productivity tools including model-to-model transformations, capitalization through patterns, libraries of replicable elements, layout copy-paste, system to subsystem transition, etc.
• Native support for viewpoint extensions, allowing to extend and/or specialize the core environment to address particular engineering concerns (performance, operating safety, security, cost, weight, product line, etc.), combined with the possibility to carry out multi-criteria analyses of target architectures to help find the best trade-offs.

Figure 1. Capella diagram examples

Beside the graphical modeling workbench, the Capella project includes a development environment (based on Kitalpha and Sirius) providing means to customize and extend the workbench: Meta-model extensions, additional views, additional diagrams or diagram layers, bridges towards or from other engineering tools, etc.

While the Capella project includes a set of basic Capella-coupled viewpoints, it is not in the scope of the project to develop specialty viewpoints nor bridges towards other specialty engineering tools.