Software systems in complex technological environments, such as production/power plants, railway systems, or medical diagnosis devices, consist of various components and subsystems. Vendors of such systems face the challenge to design models that allow configuring individual components and to incorporating them into a complete system. Because components usually interact in diverse ways by exchanging data, and using services from each other, designing and combining the individual software models to a coherent and consistent system is highly complex which affects production and requires sophisticated ICT support.
For this highly complex task, a variety of software systems and hardware tools are in place that need to interplay within large-scale projects and be reusable in combination.

The goal of COSIMO is to ensure the development of systems of systems within teams of teams without dictating one monolithic tool environment. The overall goal is to provide a framework allowing teams to work with their preferred formalisms, languages, and tools, while ensuring (i) roundtripable model exchange among the tools, (ii) consistent collaborative modeling, and (iii) guided model evolution. It has to be noted that, although this overall goal appears to be quite ambitious at a first sight, its attainability is backed by the fact that COSIMO will heavily build on the results gained in the realm of several previous research projects successfully conducted by the project consortium in the area of MDE.