CORDIS Archive
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Click on the sensitive areas of this map (those underlined) to know more about how Esprit can support the technology development and adoption process. Two examples have been chosen: decision support systems and software reuse.
The process of penetration of high technologies, like software products and processes, into markets follows a number of necessary phases:
In Esprit Software Technologies, R&D activities deal essentially with the innovator phase, where the market is not yet fully developed, whereas Technology Transfer activities (i.e. Trial Applications supported by Leveraging Actions) are meant to help crossing the critical barrier between the innovator and the early adopter phase. Finally Software Best Practice activities, concerned with accelerating the take-up of stable but still underdeployed technologies, usually dwell in already established market contexts by covering a substantial part of both early and late majority markets.
The CHARADE project offered the first prototype tool to provide complete support for the entire process of fire management, from fire detection and localisation, 
to fire threat assessment, intervention planning and resource allocation. It speeds up firemen decision making during forest fires fighting.
The market for the CHARADE prototype is fire control centers in the Mediterranean regions. Other potential markets include training centers for fire operators and civil defense institutions dealing with environmental emergencies such as floading or pollution control.
The technology developed in CHARADE has been deployed into a real operational context by means of the trial application project CARICA, which populated a forest fire intervention database to be accessed by firemen, trainers and trainees for studying and debriefing forest fire interventions.
Further to this first deployment, a leveraging action called NOW has been initiated, which investigates the potential of this technology for natural emergencies other than fires. It is currently implementing technology transfer actions at regional level in several countries around the Mediterranean.
Software reuse is considered as one of the key factors to improve quality and decrease cost of sofware-intensive system development and deployment: Esprit has supported a number of projects on this subject. The projects developed in the first two Framework programmes (in the second half of the 80's) contributed to a better understanding of the issues at stake and developed innovative techniques supporting the 
classification and retrieval of software modules and objects.
In the early 90's it became evident that software reuse has to be pervasive to the entire software lifecycle, rather than limited to the design and implementation phases: the REBOOT project took such holistic approach, looking at reuse methods, tools and economics.
The wealth of information and results generated in several projects on software reuse and evolution was capitalised by Software Evolution and Reuse (SER), a leveraging action which tried out the new reuse techniques on a number of industrial case studies and reported on these experiences, also by means of one of the most frequently accessed sites on software reuse.
In the meanwhile, software reuse has become part of what is generally considered as best practice in software development and has been a key component in several process improvement experiments supported under the ESSI initiative. Amongst the others, IRIS piloted REBOOT in the space domain, whereas REPRO used it for retail banking. More recently FRUIT and SURF have combined the use of the REBOOT methodology with the flexibility and effectiveness of Internet and intranet approaches. The lesson learned through most of these experiments will be collected and made available to a wide audience by the dissemination action SURPRISE.
The URL of this page is /esprit/src/stcycle.htm
It was last updated on 15 April 1997, and is maintained by Andrea Di Maio
