Modeling for rapid systems prototyping: Hospital situational awareness system design

The COVID-19 pandemic caught hospitals unprepared. The need to treat patients remotely and with limited resources led hospitals to identify a gap in their operational situational awareness. During the pandemic, Israeli Aerospace Industries helped hospitals to address the gap by designing a system to support their effective operation, management and decision making. In this paper, we report on the development of a functional, working prototype of the system using model-based engineering approach and tools. Our approach relies on domain-specific modeling, incorporating metamodeling and domain-specific representations based on the problem domain’s ontology. The tools practiced are those embedded into the Eclipse Modeling Framework—specifically, Ecore Tools and Sirius. While these technological tools are typically used to create dedicated, engineering-related modeling tools, in this work, we use them to create a functional system prototype. We discuss the advantages of our approach as well as the challenges with respect to the existing tools and their underlying technology. Based on the reported experience, we encourage practitioners to adopt model-based engineering as an effective way to develop systems. Furthermore, we call researchers and tool developers to improve the state-of-the-art as well as the existing implementations of pertinent tools to support model-based rapid prototyping.