No abstract

Abstract. Telecommunication services are widespread and subject today to tensions on a competitive market. Telecommunication service design is more and more software oriented. To reduce time to market and cost of services, a service designer better need to simulate and evaluate his design earlier. The approach proposed in this paper is to reduce the abstraction gap between modeling and simulation phases using model transformation. But manual transformations are so far time consuming and error prone. As a trustworthy solution, model based techniques and associated transformations permit to systematically link service models with simulation phase before realization. We thus propose as a first contribution a meta-model dedicated to concepts of IP Multimedia Subsystem core network as a case study. Our meta-model constrains and defines such network entities to be used in the code generation, which is our second contribution. The implementation of a video conference service permits to illustrate our workbench.

To favour an early exposure of students to professional practice, several engineering higher education institutions have implemented integrated curricula, as proposed in the international CDIO educational framework. In the 1990s, the French engineering education accreditation body introduced in its quality standards a compulsory internship period. Based on this national experience, this article sets out the various models of internships and apprenticeships in French engineering education and presents two curriculum integrations: one in a highly selective public graduate Grande Ecole and another in a private multisite engineering institution strongly linked to professional branches and national qualification framework. To provide some inputs and rationales to educational programme designers in other national contexts, this article proposes to extend the CDIO framework to systematically include work-based learning as integrated activities, to better match industry requirements and student competency expectations as future engineers.