The ATMOSPHERE project is partly funded by the Commission of the European Communities as an ESPRIT II Technology Integration Project (TIP). Its ambition is to make a major contribution to the progress of the state of the art of System Engineering in Europe. In order to do so, the project has adopted a very pragmatic approach which is reflected in the ATMOSPHERE acronym meaning: Advanced Tools and Methods for System Production in Heterogeneous, Extensible, Real Environments. The Definition Phase of the ATMOSPHERE project was launched in February 1989. The studies carried out during this phase concluded that, rather than designing a general common Engineering System model, a few application domains should be selected and corresponding System Engineering environments supporting methods and tools appropriate to each domain should be constructed. On the basis of these conclusions, a complete description of the project's technical work and organisation was produced and a four-year Development Phase was started in June 1990. The main partners in the Development Phase are BULL (F), CAP GEMINI INNOVATION (F), PHILIPS (NL), SFGL (F), SIEMENS (D), and SNI (ex NIXDORF) (D), with CAP GEMINI INNOVATION acting the Coordinating Partner. The first part of the Development Phase effort (the so-called Toolset Phase), is about 250 person-years, is supported by 24 partners (main contractors, associate contractors and sub-contractors) in 10 European countries, including two EFTA countries. The purpose of this paper is to give a general presentation of the ATMOSPHERE project. Section 2 defines the Mission and the Strategy of the project. In Section 3 the Technical Work breakdown is given. The concepts related to System Engineering and Integrated Environments are discussed in Section 4. Section 5 describes the work undertaken in ATMOSPHERE on Integration Technology. Environment Construction and Evaluation aspects for each of the five application-specific environments are presented in section 6. Section 7 is devoted to Technology Transfer and Standardisation issues. Finally, some concluding remarks are given in Section 8.
