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Applications of Formal Methods, Modeling, and Testing Strategies for Safe Software Development
Published in Qamar Mahboob, Enrico Zio, Handbook of RAMS in Railway Systems, 2018
Alessandro Fantechi, Alessio Ferrari, Stefania Gnesi
Although several successful experiences on the use of formal methods in railway systems have been documented in the literature, formal methods are still perceived as experimental techniques by railway practitioners. The reasons are manifold. On the one hand, handling model checkers and theorem provers requires specialized knowledge that is often beyond the competencies of railway engineers. On the other hand, the introduction of formal methods requires radical restructuring of the development process of companies and does not allow to easily reuse code and other process artifacts that were produced with the traditional process. In addition, available formal tools are designed to be used by experts and rarely have engineering-friendly interfaces that could make their use more intuitive for practitioners. Hence, while it has taken more than 20 years to consolidate the usage of formal methods in the development process of railway manufacturers, the model-based design paradigm has gained ground much faster. Modeling has indeed the same degree of recommendation of formal methods by EN 50128. The defining principle of this approach is that the whole development shall be based on graphical model abstractions, from which implementation can be manually or automatically derived. Tools supporting this technology allows performance of simulations and tests of the system models before the actual deployment: the objective is not different from the one of formal methods, that is, detecting design defects before the actual implementation, but while formal methods are perceived as rigid and difficult, model-based design is regarded as closer to the needs of developers, which consider graphical simulation as more intuitive than formal verification. This trend has given increasing importance to tools such as MagicDraw,13 IBM Rational Rhapsody,14 SCADE, and the tool suite MATLAB®/Simulink®/Stateflow®.15 MagicDraw and Rhapsody provide capabilities for designing high-level models according to the well-known unified modeling language (UML) and provide support for systems modeling language (SysML), which is an extension of the UML for system engineering.
A model-based framework for increasing the interdisciplinary design of mechatronic production systems
Published in Journal of Engineering Design, 2018
Konstantin Kernschmidt, Stefan Feldmann, Birgit Vogel-Heuser
In order to provide a comprehensible modelling environment for practically evaluating the developed modelling approach, a prototypical SysML4Mechatronics editor was implemented (Figure 7). In comparison to general-purpose modelling editors, which usually integrate various modelling languages and notations (e.g. MagicDraw® includes UML, SysML, BPMN, UPDM and others), the developed customised editor has the advantage that it focuses only on the relevant aspects of the SysML4Mechatronics approach. Thus, potential users can interact with the system easily, even if they are not familiar with a specific (complex) industrial SysML editor. In order to represent the metamodel elements, e.g. with according symbols in a diagram (Moody 2009), a concrete syntax was defined in addition to the abstract metamodel. Furthermore, the tool offers supporting functionalities, which cannot be defined in the metamodel. For example, to support the development process and reduce complexity, the modelling editor offers a filter concept that allows users from a specific discipline to show only their blocks and, if existent, connections to parts of other disciplines. The elements, which are not relevant for that discipline, i.e. which have no connections to blocks from that discipline, are suppressed by the filter.