SimPL: A product-line modeling methodology for families of integrated control systems

Abstract

The four papers listed above are self-contained. Therefore, some information is repeated. There are also some differences in the terminologies used in the papers. My contributions For all papers, I was responsible for the idea, implementation, experiments design, analysis, and writing. My supervisors contributed in all phases of the work. During my PhD study, I also contributed another paper that is not included in this thesis.

Model-Based Automated and Guided Configuration of Embedded Software Systems

“…Many ICS producers follow a product-line engineering approach to develop the software embedded in their systems. They typically build a generic software that needs to be configured for each product according to the product's hardware architecture [5]. For example, in the oil and gas domain, embedded software needs to be configured for various field layouts (e.g., from single satellite wells to large multiple sites), for individual devices' properties (e.g., specific sensor resolution and scale levels), and for communication protocols with hardware devices.…”

“…We give an overview of our modelbased solution in Section 3. SimPL methodology [5] for modeling families of ICSs is briefly presented in Section 4. We present our model-based approach to the abovementioned configuration problems in Section 5.…”

“…In short, the existing configuration support at our industry partner faces the following challenges (which seem to be generalizable to many other ICSs [5]): (1) Checking the consistency between hardware and software configurations is not automated. (2) Verification of partially-specified configurations to enable instant configuration checking is not supported.…”

“…(3) Engineers are not provided with sufficient interactive guidance throughout the configuration process. In our previous work [5], we proposed a modeling methodology to properly capture and document, among other things, the software-hardware dependencies and consistency rules. In this paper, we build on our previous work to develop an automated guided configuration tool that addresses all the above-mentioned challenges.…”

“…During the product-line modeling step, we provide domain experts with a UML/MARTE-based methodology, called SimPL [5], to manually create a product-line model describing an ICS family. The SimPL methodology enables engineers to create product line models from textual specifications and the scattered domain experts knowledge.…”