Exploring model-based repositories for a broad range of industrial applications and challenges

Nowadays, systems are becoming increasingly complex and large and the process of developing such large-scale systems is becoming complicated with high cost and enormous effort required. Such a complicated process has a prominent challenge to ensure the quality of delivered artifacts. Therefore there is clearly a need to facilitate reuse of developed artifacts (e.g., requirements, architecture, tests) and enable automated analyses such as risk analyses, prioritizing test cases, change impact analysis, with the objective to reduce cost, effort and improve quality. Model-based engineering provides a promising mechanism to facilitate reuse and enable automation. The key idea is to use models as the backbone of structuring repositories that contain reusable artifacts (e.g., test cases, requirements). Such a backbone model is subse-quently used to enable various types of automation such as model-based testing and automated rule verification. In this paper, we report 12 industrial projects from five different industry domains that all require the construction of model-based repositories to enable various types of automation. We believe using models as the backbone to structure repositories for the purpose of enabling different types of automation in different contexts is a new and non-conventional model-based development research approach. This exploratory paper will serve the basis for future research to derive a generic model-based repository.