ATMOSPHERE aims to develop standardised facilities to support system engineering activities. These facilities will comprise a framework and integrated tools and services that will form a basis for the development of application-specific integrated system engineering environments. These environments will in turn be constructed from integrated tool-sets hosted on the framework, and will provide engineering management functions as well as the system engineering functions relevant to the application domain.
The project aims to develop standardized facilities to support system engineering activities. These facilities will comprise a framework and integrated tools and services that will form a basis for the development of application specific integrated system engineering environments.

The definition phase of the project has produced a study of system engineering that takes the literature and the current state of practice within the members of the consortium into account. This study attempted to define a common system engineering model suitable for a wide range of application domains. A complementary study was carried out to define a rationale for the various methods and tools proposed for use within the advanced techniques and models of system productions in a heterogeneous, extensible and rigorous environment (ATMOSPHERE) project. In addition, the definition phase of ATMOSPHERE has concluded that there are 2 complementary approaches to environment integration: a framework driven or architecture driven approach, based on the use of a preselected integration framework and a method or toolset driven approach, based on more loosely coupled communication oriented mechanisms. The development phase of ATMOSPHERE is organized in such a way that it starts from the current state of practice, within the partners' organizations, of automated support for the system engineering process (in terms of system engineering tools and methods as well as integration approaches) in order to progressively consolidate and standardise a common system engineering approach (process models and methods) and a set of complementary environment integration techniques.
ATMOSPHERE is targeted to support system engineering for applications in IT covering switching, manufacturing, office and embedded systems.

A standards-based approach will be followed throughout. Existing standards (industrial, national and international) will be adopted in the development of the ATMOSPHERE framework, tools, services and interfaces, though it is expected that these standards will be adapted, through exploitation and marketing activities, to enable them to encompass a wider range of interrelated technologies.