Final Report Summary - CRISTAL-ISE (CRISTAL-ISE: Discovering and managing eBusiness collaborations)
INTRODUCTION: The CRISTAL-ISE IAPP project aimed at furthering IT development and exploitation skills in researchers by building medium to long-term partnerships between academics and industry and thereby managing e-business collaborations. It brought together experienced software engineers from UK academia and French commerce to enable a learning culture both for existing and for new, early-stage researchers in the production of novel software systems and their transfer to the commercial arena. Partners in the project were: the Centre for Complex Cooperative Systems (CCCS) at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol (UK), software providers to industry at the M1i company in Annecy, France and at ALPHA3i in Rumilly, France. The CRISTAL-ISE project is the vehicle in which new engineers at M1i and ALPHA3i have acquired knowledge of the software technology behind CRISTAL (developed by UWE for the CERN Large Hadron Collider experiments) and are now placed to exploit that knowledge in the commercial environments of their parent companies. The main mechanism for such exchange of knowledge between partners was the staff secondments between partner sites that were supported in the CRISTAL-ISE IAPP project.
PROJECT OUTLINE: The project was delivered through three distinct stages or phases:
1. Analysis and Education (in months 1-15 of the 48 month project): centred on building a stable baseline version of the CRISTAL software for Open Source (V3) release.
2. Design and Development (in months 13-36 of CRISTAL-ISE: the transfer of analysis and design expertise from the academics of UWE to the commercial researchers at M1i and ALPHA-3I.
3. Product realisation (in months 31-48 of the project): the research were integrated and viewed in the commercial road-maps of M1i (Agilium NG) and Alpha3i (CIMAG-RA).
The project spanned seven workpackages that mapped onto those project phases, including analysis and design of both the CRISTAL and application software packages, systems integration and product commercialisation, project management and dissemination and outreach.
WORK PERFORMED & ACHIEVEMENTS: The work has centred around the innovation of a new CRISTAL Kernel, the in-depth training and education of seven Marie Curie Research Fellows on partner premises, the production of a number of academic papers and their presentation at international events, the delivery of a set of project outputs including requirements analysis reports and public dissemination materials. This work has delivered :
• An Open Source version of the CRISTAL software (V3.0) available under a LGPL3 licence;
• Versions of the Agilium NG Core (M1i) and CIMAG-RA (Agilium) software products;
• A project web-site: www.cristal-ise.eu featuring an outreach video, project posters and flyers;
• A set of successful project secondments between partners UWE, M1i and ALPHA3i and
• Ten academic papers presented at international conferences between 2012 and 2016, including:
System Evolution via Model-Driven Design. A. Branson et al., Proc of the 14th Int Conf on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS12) Vol 2 pp 142-145. July 2012.
CRISTAL : A Practical Study in Designing Systems to Cope with Change. A Branson et al., Information Systems. 42: 139-152 (2014)
CRISTAL-ISE : Provenance Applied in Industry. J Shamdasani et al., Proc of the Int Conf on Entreprise Information Systems (ICEIS14). April 2014 &
Designing Traceability into Big Data Systems. R McClatchey et al., Proc of the 5th Annual Int Conf on ICT: Big Data, Cloud and Security (ICT:BDCS 2015), Singapore July 2015.
EXPECTED RESULTS & IMPACT: The CRISTAL-ISE project has already cemented the pre- existing relationship between UWE and M1i and has enabled ALPHA3i to build new working partnerships with UWE and M1i. It is expected that the partners will seek further support from national and international funding agencies to extend their research programmes and capitalise on the outputs of CRISTAL-ISE to provide new versions of product and experienced software engineers.
• It is anticipated that M1i, as a recent technology company, will develop a new layer in its Agilium technology offering. Additionally M1i will be able to develop market-oriented packaged solutions. This will perfectly fit with its new business area and future plans.
• ALPHA3i as a mature functioning company will drive the first concrete implementation of the CRISTAL-ISE software in their market. In particular its CIMAG-RA product is expected to be significantly enhanced through the use of the CRISTAL technology (see [5]).
• UWE as a public body will further develop its academic research and will gain expertise in private software company activities (such as product design, product marketing). This will later facilitate the start up of a new company that is based on UWE research within CCCS.
Furthermore M1i aims to deliver vertical packages around the new Agilium product offering based on CRISTAL-ISE. These targets have already been defined: Financial Services, Healthcare and the Public sector (internal process organisation in relation to citizen information).
Project Website: www.cristal-ise.eu