Online Collaborative Environment for Designing Complex Computational Systems

Developers of information systems have always utilized various visual formalisms during the design process, albeit in an informal manner. Architecture diagrams, finite state machines, and signal flow graphs are just a few examples. Model Integrated Computing (MIC) is an approach that considers these design artifacts as first class models and uses them to generate the system or subsystems automatically. Moreover, the same models can be used to analyze the system and generate test cases and documentation. MIC advocates the formal definition of these formalisms, called domain-specific modeling languages (DSML), via metamodeling and the automatic configuration of modeling tools from the metamodels. However, current MIC infrastructures are based on desktop applications that support a limited number of platforms, discourage concurrent design collaboration and are not scalable. This paper presents WebGME, a cloud- and web-based cyberinfrastructure to support the collaborative modeling, analysis, and synthesis of complex, large-scale scientific and engineering information systems. It facilitates interfacing with existing external tools, such as simulators and analysis tools, it provides custom domain-specific visualization support and enables the creation of automatic code generators.