Designing and Integrating Complex Systems: Be Agile Through Liveness Verification and Abstraction

Abstract

Abstract. Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is recognised as a strong way to develop high-quality systems, and specifically reactive systems. Within MDA, models are in the center of a stepwise development based on extensions, refinements and transformation. Systems Engineering addresses the problem of complex system development in a holistic way, however, there is a lack of tools to verify models from a behavioural point of view at the earlier stage of the development, taking into account that the specifications are evolving during the system development. We propose IDF, a framework for Incremental Development of Compliant Models, which is constituted with a set of relations based on the verification of liveness properties. It is computed on abstract models automatically set up from behavioural specifications of the system or its component. These relations detect non-conformance of models during their evolution (extension or refinement) such as the non-interoperability of sub-components belonging to an architecture.

Safe Incremental Design of UML Architectures

“…It requires models to be transformed into LTS (Labelled Transition System). This is automatically achieved using IDCM [15,14] which transforms the architecture into the EXP.OPEN formalism. This example points out that MUTEX2 is a "good" realization of the initial specification from a liveness point of view, as defined by the ISO standard [12].…”

“…The novelty of our proposed approach is to consider at early steps of the design both liveness and safety properties. In a previous work [8,15,14], we have presented our Incremental Development Framework (IDF) and its associated tool IDCM (Incremental Development of Conformance Models). IDF supports the development and the evaluation of UML models for reactive systems.…”