Modeling P&C Insurance Products, the MAIF Case-Study

EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) is mostly used to create model-driven tools for software or system engineers. Here, in this case-study, an EMF-based tool is directly used by business domain experts to create models which are deployed and interpreted at runtime.

MAIF is a french insurance company with 2.8 millions of insured members (ranked 5th in number of insured vehicules and habitations in France). They needed a tool to get a structured, centralized and unified vision of the P&C (property and casualty) products (IARD in french for Incendie, Accidents et Risques Divers).

The goal was to provide to insurance business experts a dedicated tool to specify their marketing offers and the caracteristics of their products. 

The solution is a product catalog composed of:

• a product workbench (based on Eclipse) to define and administrate the products structure
• a repository to store the models
• a business rules engine (based on JRules) to manage and execute the rules related to the products

Accessible via services the catalog is used to manage production version of contracts and claims.

The structure of the catalog, developed with the assistance of Capgemini and Obeo, is based on an Ecore model which defines the P&C products concepts (catalog, product, coverage, risk object, provision, option, etc) and the way they can be composed.

The product workbench is used by MAIF P&C experts to define the products and administrate their life-cycle.

It provides graphical representations to create, modify, consult, version and validate the products.

These GMF diagrams are graphical representations on EMF models describing each product. They have been specified with Obeo Designer. 

They selected Obeo Designer in order to speed-up the definition of the important number of GMF views to develop and to facilitate their maintenance.

Additional developments have been done in Eclipse to finalize the workbench:

• RCP customization to simplify the workbench (menus, toolbars and views) according to the kind of users
• integration of LDAP to authentificate the users and manage their roles (product manager, validator, ...)
• integration of SVN to manage collaborative work on products

The models created by the workbench are directly consumed by the IT system through distributed services (progressively remplacing legacy ones).

Without the need of specific IT developements, the deployment of new products is reduced from several weeks to about one week.

This new approach increases the agility of P&C products deployment by reducing the gap between business experts and IT.

You can find a more detailed description of this case-study, written by MAIF, on www.obeonetwork.com, in the case-studies section of Obeo Designer group (registration required).

Creating a new Ecore model with Obeo Designer 6.0

One of the cool things coming with Obeo Designer 6.0 is the new "Ecore Modeling Project" creation wizard.

It automatically creates an EMF project containing an Ecore model and its corresponding genmodel. This project is also created with the Modeling Project nature and a Obeo Designer representation file (.aird) containing a diagram (depending on the viewpoint selected with the wizard).

This diagram is automatically opened and you can directly start graphically design your Domain Model.

Once you have defined your packages, classes, attributes, relations, ... you just have to open the genmodel and generate the EMF code. Of course you can customize the genmodel to introduce your own generation choices.

This video demonstrates this new wizard on a simple Ecore model.