Thales is a global technology leader for the aerospace, transport, defense and security sectors. With 80,000 employees in 68 countries, Thales has a unique capability to design and deploy equipment, systems and services to meet the most complex security requirements. They are the creators of both Capella and the Model Based Systems Engineering methodology, Arcadia. 

Capella and Arcadia are a comprehensive and extensible Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) tool and method for designing systems architecture, used for complex systems engineering tasks. Originally an internal product, Thales has started open sourcing more and more components since 2013, in the framework of the Capella Eclipse Project, with the goal to create an ecosystem around their technology and accelerate its development.

IncQuery Labs has been collaborating with Thales since 2014, participating in several projects ranging from development contributions to complex research projects, highlighting the importance of industrialized research. Our way of working naturally integrates with the processes of internal research and development departments. IncQuery Labs has contributed to several studies on various engineering tool related topics, helping Thales save on costs on high-risk high-gain experiments, helping to shape the path for strategic innovation. 

Working for Thales on Capella-related topics is an also an important open source success story for IncQuery Labs.

- We have made several contributions to Eclipse Diff/Merge Core and its Diff/Merge Model Patch feature, a framework to calculate differences and merge changes in hierarchical engineering models. We improved internals as well as the user interface, and our GUI testing approach was even adapted internally.

- During the years, our work with Capella motivated contributions to Eclipse VIATRA. VIATRA is an important enabler framework in the Eclipse Modeling stack, supporting model queries and transformations. In the Capella context, VIATRA powered an add-on for ad-hoc querying, as well as a graphical query definition language designed to help systems engineers make use of this feature in a user-friendly way.  

- The outcome of our latest open source collaborative effort is the OpenMBEE Capella connector, a tool that integrates Capella into the Open Model Based Engineering Environment (OpenMBEE), a new framework for modern collaborative systems engineering tools. The connector implements simple version management features so that Capella users can use the MMS as a collaboration platform.