In 2000, the OMG (Object Management Group) published the MDA (Model Driven Architecture), its new approach for building and maintaining large and complex engineering systems. The MDA is built on the principle of separation of concerns, by using models and models transformations within the whole software life cycle. The main idea is that the business concerns can be modeled independently from any other concerns (e.g. middleware). Therefore, business models are not corrupted by technical concerns. This is a strongly anticipated way of simplifying the construction of applications. Hence, the main part of the development becomes an activity upstream, dedicated to business concerns through the elaboration of the application model that abstracts technical details away, i.e., the so-called Platform-Independent Model (PIM). The transformation of a PIM into a Platform-Specific Model (PSM) is then achieved when introducing into the PIM the technical considerations depending on the chosen middleware.

 During the last six years many works have been done on MDA. Standards such as MOF and UML have gained in maturity. Industrial tools have provided really efficient operations on models such as code, test and documentation generation but also model validation and process assessment. Open source communities are now more and more popular and provide free facilities that reduce the cost of applying MDA. Moreover, academics, by solving identified challenges still push MDA out of its limits. That’s why it’s time now to consider MDA as an industrial approach that offers clear and identified benefits. The fact is that companies, such as Thales, Airbus and WesternGeco, do invest in MDA for their own development.

 This tutorial will present state of the art of MDA. The approach will be clearly and fully explained in order to understand what benefits can be obtained and how. Standards such as UML, MOF, XMI, OCL and QVT will be thoroughly presented. Ongoing industrial MDA projects will also be presented. A complete code generation from UML models for the Sony AIBO robot will illustrate and close the tutorial.