Plastic Omnium turned to List to make the processes used to design and develop its fuel tanks and diesel-emissions-reduction systems more efficient. The company is now taking steps to replace its traditional approach—writing specifications in natural language—with a more powerful method. List is helping Plastic Omnium to use model-driven engineering to express its product specifications in a dedicated language.

List researchers are using Papyrus, a design and modelling environment that employs a foundation of common, widely-used design languages. The researchers developed a specific usage of SysML, a general-purpose modelling language, and development processes tailored to Plastic Omnium's needs and working methods.

The result is a software platform Plastic Omnium can use to draw up organized specifications that can be leveraged by information systems. The specifications are more coherent, complete, and detailed and contain fewer redundancies than conventional specifications.

The concept was tested successfully on several pilot projects concerning the design of diesel-emissions-reduction systems. The tests revealed significant improvements in productivity and product quality and indicated possible development cost savings. Based on these results, Plastic Omnium is now implementing the tool at its R&D center with the support of Atos and C-Mind, which provide industrial customers with services related to the Papyrus platform.