Opees

The mission statement of OPEES is “to settle a community and build the necessary means and enablers to ensure long-term availability of innovative engineering technologies in the domain of dependable / critical software-intensive embedded systems”.

For OPEES partners and supporters, this challenge can be achieved if we succeed in building an ecosystem in the open source frame, with the relevant business models, in order to ensure this long term availability of engineering tools and components.

The viability of such an ecosystem requires several elements that the OPEES project aims at providing:

• An open and visible organization with an European and world-wide dimension, implementing the business models / business plan and dissemination plan defined in the project, allowing the emergence of a European service industry able to create profitable business and employment,
• a common vision and roadmap which allows to share and build upon the results of R&D collaborative projects and to ensure consistency and complementarities for the future R&D projects that will be launched to complete the set of engineering tools,
• An open technical repository that will hold a first set of core components & tools matured and assessed following the OPEES methodologies, and will support collaborative works around these components,
• A set of processes and guidelines for tools/components maturation, verification & qualification, for the candidate tools/components validated through experimentations on real use cases to ensure components durability and interoperability, through promotion of open standards, in adequacy with industrial needs, constraints and domain standards.

The OPEES ITEA2 project can really be seen as a bootstrap for the OPEES organization, which will be created and launched in the early stage of the project. The OPEES organization could not succeed if the necessary R&D activities, related to the definition and the experimentation of innovative processes & guidelines for components maturation, inspection, verification and qualification, were not run in the supporting ITEA2 OPEES project. That’s why a work package in the project structure is fully dedicated to these R&D activities, strongly interacting with the work package in charge of the vision and roadmaps and the work package dealing with experimentations. These three WP are tightly coupled and form the core R&D activities of OPEES. An important focus is also set on dissemination, which is crucial for such a project, with a dedicated work package. The last work package dealing with management will hold also the important issue of defining the relevant business models that will be implemented by the OPEES organization.

The constitution of the project consortium has already contributed to give a European visibility to this initiative initially started in France. Spain, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Austria are taking part, Finland is willing to participate. With Germany, strong relationships are already established through the EICOSE innovation cluster. Thanks to the dissemination activities, which are important in the OPEES project, we will continue to spread the OPEES initiative in a larger number of European countries. The different types of partners involved in the OPEES project (industrial end-users in many different domains: aerospace, energy, IT…, tools and services providers, research laboratories and universities) will ensure this dissemination through their proper networks. National and European competitiveness clusters are also strongly supporting OPEES and will play a great role regarding the dissemination.

With all these dimensions (R&D activities on processes and validation of these processes through experimentations, strong study of business models, vision and strategic orientations, active communication and dissemination), the OPEES ITEA2 project will provide all the ingredients necessary to make OPEES a successful reality.