Flexible Engineering Environment Integration for (Software+) Engineering Teams

For the development of complex software-based systems multi-disciplinary engineering teams have to cooperate. While there are elaborate software tools for each engineering discipline, there is surprisingly little work on flexible and efficient component-based integration of engineering tools across disciplines. In this paper, the authors present the "Engineering Service Bus", an integration platform for (software+) engineering systems based on the established Enterprise Service Bus concept for business software systems. Based on real-world software engineering use cases adapted to the (software+) engineering domain, they show how the Engineering Service Bus allows prototyping & reuse of engineering processes and discuss strengths and limitations of the proposed concept.