Alexander Tynsdale-Biscoe:
Practical Use of the RM-ODP - The COMBINE Project

ABSTRACT

The COMBINE Project is a research programme, part funded by the Europea$
Commission, which has the goal of supporting model-driven development of
enterprise systems - using Components. This involves development of
methods, infrastructures and tools as well as business solutions for
modelling, designing, deploying, testing and running components
successfully in an enterprise-wide scale. The COMBINE Project has
adopted the RM-ODP as an underlying framework, and the OMG's UML Profile
for Enterprise Distributed Object Computing (UML for EDOC) as the
unifying modelling technique.


The main work items the COMBINE project are:

· Development of methodology and tools that support modelling in all the
  viewpoints of RM-ODP:
	- enterprise viewpoint 
	- computational viewpoint 
	- information viewpoint 
	- engineering viewpoint
	- technology viewpoint.

·  Development of cohesive component concepts that are independent of
   any particular technology, e.g. J2EE/EJB, COM or CORBA, that address
   granularity questions from coarse-grained to fine-grained components,
   and that apply throughout the development lifecycle,

·  Development of pilot systems that underpin the value of sound
   development frameworks (methodologies and tools),

·  Analysis of Quality Assurance and Testing Techniques that will enable
   to the development of Conformance Tools and Tests for Component Based
   methodologies, and

·  Continuous exploitation and dissemination of results.