On the Need for Intellectual Property Protection in Model-Driven Co-Engineering Processes.

We live in an increasingly complex world where all systems tend to include heterogeneous and interconnected components. To cope with these systems, industry is shifting towards co-engineering development processes where partners with very different roles and access needs must collaborate together. Therefore, protecting the intellectual property (IP) of the shared assets is a must. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) may play a key role in the successful enactment of industrial co-engineering processes but only if it succeeds at integrating at its core the concern for IP protection, that has been up to the date largely ignored. In order to advance in this direction, we provide in this paper an initial roadmap towards the holistic protection of IP in collaborative modeling scenarios and we discuss how existing technologies such as Cryptography, Access-control (AC) or Digital Rights Management (DRM) are adapted and integrated in a framework for IP protection in the MDE.