With this post, I'm trying to clarify the relationship between these "model-driven" concepts and the notion of model-based engineering (MBE).

I use "model-based engineering" (or "model-based development") to refer to a softer version of MDE. That is, to me, a MBE process is a process in which software models play an important role although they are not necessarily the key artifacts of the development (i.e. they do not "drive" the process as in MDD). An example would be a development process where, in the analysis phase, designers specify the platform-independent models of the system but then these models are directly handed out to the programmers to manually write the code (no automatic code-generation involved and no explicit definition of any platform-specific model). In this process, models still play an important role but are not the basis of the development process.

Therefore, I see MBE as a superset of MDE. All model-driven processes are model-based but not the other way round.

From the previous post it was clear that there is no general agreement on the meaning of all these MDA,MDE, MDD... concepts so I don't expect to convince you with this one either. If you have a better proposal feel free to share it here!

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