Alstom Transport chooses Artisan Studio

Alstom Transport will deploy Artisan Studio in its network of 20 design teams located in five countries worldwide in order to establish a uniform, company-wide systems engineering process expected to improve design quality, speed-up design cycle times and reduce design costs.

According to Jean Le Bastard, Chief Architect of Alstom Transport, the adoption of SysML and global deployment of Artisan Studio as its SysML development platform of choice is fundamental to the company’s systems engineering strategy going forward. “We wanted to move to the kind of model-based design methodology that SysML and Artisan Studio offer in order to significantly improve our overall approach to systems engineering,” he said.

With a market share of 18%, Alstom Transport develops and markets the most complete range of systems, equipment and services in the railway market. The company is the market leader in the high and very high speed train sector and ranks second worldwide in the market for urban transport, regional trains, signaling, infrastructure equipment and all associated services. Artisan Studio, Artisan Software Tools’ flagship model-driven development tool suite, provides complete support for OMG SysMLTM, UML and Architectural Frameworks in a single, integrated environment. It delivers on the promise of an integrated collaborative development environment, allowing systems and software engineering teams to Work as OneTM, from concept through to delivery, maintenance and support.

Alstom Transport chose Artisan Studio following a comprehensive evaluation of all the leading SysML tools on the market. The evaluation focused on several key criteria. These included conformance with the SysML standard, ease of integration and extensibility, collaborative design and quality of support. Artisan Studio emerged a clear winner on all counts. During the evaluation process, it became increasingly evident to Alstom Transport that Artisan Studio would not only be able to significantly improve the quality of their overall systems engineering methodology but would also reduce project design time and therefore costs. “Although quantifying cost savings is difficult we were quickly able to determine that effort involved in the design specification stage could be reduced dramatically, by around two-thirds, without compromising design quality,” commented Jean Le Bastard.

Alstom Transport also wanted a SysML tool supplier that truly understood the standard and Artisan’s leading role in both defining SysML and driving its adoption also proved an important deciding factor. “SysML conformance was a critical issue for us,” continued Jean Le Bastard. “From a systems design perspective, we want all of our engineers to use the same design tools and work in the same way. Artisan Studio provides a strong solution in this respect. Structurally, Artisan Studio’s conformance to the SysML was the best and its underlying semantic checking capability will ensure that we can keep engineers ‘on-message’ from a design perspective. Our systems engineers will have a clear vision on how to apply their design flair within parameters that we mandate, rather than tackle design projects in an individual style.”

Alstom Transport’s global SysML strategy maps well with Artisan’s Work as OneTM philosophy. With its geographically dispersed design teams, a development environment truly capable of supporting collaborative working was also important to Alstom Transport. “As a multi-national company, our systems design projects involve teams in a variety of countries. Artisan Studio will be the catalyst for improved collaborative working,” said Jean Le Bastard. “The ability to use the same modeling language and the same models, without the risk of unintentionally duplicated items, will be crucial in enabling us to meet our goals for future projects.”

With its best-of-breed design tool selection policy, ease of integration and extensibility was also high on the Alstom Transport’s agenda. Again Artisan Studio proved a clear winner. “Artisan Studio integrates well with other leading design tools such as Geensys’ Reqtify which we use for requirements traceability, DOORS and Simulink.”

Artisan Studio has already been put to work by Alstom transport delivering the kind of returns evidenced in the evaluation process. The feedback from the engineers working on the signaling, traction and motor control projects on which Artisan Studio has been initially been deployed is good too. “They really like the product,” concluded Jean Le Bastard.