Another year has passed, and we would like to thank our customers and the users of our technologies for working with us.

The holiday season is a good time for reflecting, and we are proud to see our motto – science for systems engineering – applied in practice.  What we achieved has been made possible by customers who believe in our technologies and who subscribe to our principles.  One of our most valued principles is openness: science should not be an end in itself: It is a means for making this world a better place. We believe that openness acts as a multiplier that increases overall wealth.  Here are three examples of our modest contributions in this respect in 2013:

Prostep ReqIF Implementor Forum: ReqIF is an open standard for the exchange of requirements.  In the implementor forum, competing organizations were peacefully working together to make the standard a success.  We saw Daimler collaborate with Volkswagen and BMW, and we saw IBM collaborate with PTC, and many others.  We acted as a service provider and used the Eclipse Requirements Modeling Framework to make the testing activities efficient and effective.  We are delighted to continue this work next year.

itea 2 openETCS: We are an active participant and work package leader in the openETCS project, which strives to develop an integrated modeling, development, validation and testing framework for leveraging the cost-efficient and reliable implementation of ETCS, the European Train Control System.  A fundamental principle of openETCS is open proofs, where an open toolchain is used for creating an open system description.  This results in lower costs and the avoidance of vendor-lock-in. We look forward to continuing our work in this project next year.

Eclipse RMF Activities: Formal Mind was the main driver in the ongoing development of the Eclipse Requirements Modeling Framework, ensuring releases every two month.  The 0.10.0 release is planned for end of January 2014.  Over the last year, we saw a steady grow of interest in RMF, which is already used in production environments.  Projects like Polarsys, openETCS, ReqCylce, Yakindu and many others either integrate RMF or provide interoperability.  Expect to see lots of progress in 2014.

Much more was happening this year, and while a lot of our activities benefit the community, we don’t see a contradiction in our principles if we exploit these contributions commercially, on the contrary: Without a business case, community activities would have to cease altogether.  Therefore, we will continue to serve the commercial market with training, coaching and tailoring of technologies.  Please talk to us – without any obligation – if you think that our technologies could make your organization more efficient and more cost-effective.

We look forward to more innovations and the spread of openness in 2014.  We wish you a peaceful holiday season and a successful 2014.