Section 3 - S&T approach and work plan

Section 3 - S&T approach and work plan

3.1 Quality and effectiveness of the S&T methodology and associated work plan

Please present your plans as follows:

i) Describe the overall strategy of the work plan (Maximum length – one page)

ii) Show the timing of the different WPs and their components (Gantt chart or similar).

iii) Provide a detailed work description broken down into work packages:

• 
  Work package list (please use table 3a);
  
• 
  Deliverables list (please use table 3b);
  
• 
  List of milestones (please use table 3c)
  
• 
  Description of each work package (please use table 3d)
  
• 
  Summary effort table (3e)
  

v) Describe any significant risks, and associated contingency plans

The objective of the project is to develop a methodology and tool support for model‐based evolutionary development of complex embedded systems, ensuring comprehensibility of models by human designers and decision makers. This objective defines the decomposition of the project into seven work packages shown in Figure 1 completed by a project management package (WP0, not shown).

The work packages can be separated in three groups: organizational work packages (WP0, WP7), business case work packages (WP1, WP6), and technology work packages (WP2–5). The project organization has been set up in such a way as to maximize modularity among the work packages, whilst allowing a clear definition of the individual contributions and the collaboration among partners.

The interfaces between the different models and tools will be clearly defined in the beginning of the project. Compliance will be monitored throughout the project duration at biannual board meetings. In order to measure the achievements of the DECISIVE approach, metrics and evaluation techniques will be defined. The DECISIVE approach will be validated in terms of usability of the solution, efficiency in resource usage, and benefits for the developed products. Finally, it should be noted that the validation use-case development in the business case packages will be guided by a selection of themes relevant to the societal and industrial priorities. These themes allow the consortium to better structure the validation tasks, relate them with corresponding activities in the technology work packages and define a coherent industrial exploitation strategy. The selection of themes is presented in the detailed WP6 description below.

/Simon Bliudze: Is this correct? Do we present themes in WP6, or should we rather write a separate sub-section for this?/

WP summaries and interconnections

The role of the organizational work packages is to ensure that the project correctly follows its course; establish and maintain communication links with relevant administration, standardization, industrial and academic bodies.

The business case packages encompass the functional link between real-life industrial requirements and the technology to be developed in the project.

Technology packages will work on the models and techniques to be used at all stages of the DECISIVE design work-flow in order to produce a coherent approach for evolutionary design and understandability of models by human designers and decision makers.

Functional Interconnections among the work packages

One of the DECISIVE objectives is to cover the entire design workflow according to the current state of the practice. Beyond the classical V-cycle, such a workflow involves several iterations of the loop consisting of a design phase, followed by the analysis phase and an adaptation of the model based on the analysis results. This workflow is illustrated in Figure below.



Figure : Target DECISIVE workflow (blue ovals represent artefacts, blue rectangles represent tools, dashed contours define the DECISIVE work package boundaries).

The workflow shown in Figure , provides also the functional dependencies between the work packages of the project (shown in dashed grey contours). Indeed, WP2 and WP3 are devoted to collection and storage of the information about the system under development, whereas WP4 and WP5 – as their names suggest – concern mainly visualisation, editing and decision support for the process. As such WP4 and WP5 are rather independent one from another and from WP2 and WP3. Hence these two packages benefit from increased modularity, thus reducing the associated risk for the project.

Work packages 2 and 3 are connected stronger due to their shared influence over the execution platform. Furthermore, clear interfaces have to be established between the modelling formalisms and monitoring and analysis techniques (that is between WP2 and WP3) in order to build flexible back-annotation mechanisms.

Project time-line

The chart below (Figure ) shows the proposed time-line for the project. In order to enable the coherent industrial validation of the models and tools developed in the project, the technology packages and validation are split in two phases. First prototypes of the industrial validators based on the results of Phase 1 of the technology packages will provide the feedback necessary for the refinement of the models and tools in Phase 2. The work in the technology packages does not start immediately but only after the specifications of the business requirements have been completed. This will ensure that the business requirements effectively influence the technology to be developed in the project. Furthermore, the work in the technology packages must be completed in advance with respect to the overall project termination in order to allow for the final validation to be effectuated on the obtained results.

Del. no. 6	Deliverable name	WP no.	Nature7	Dissemi-nation level 8	Delivery date9 (proj. month)

Milestones are control points where decisions are needed with regard to the next stage of the project. For example, a milestone may occur when a major result has been achieved, if its successful attainment is a required for the next phase of work. Another example would be a point when the consortium must decide which of several technologies to adopt for further development.