CRESCO Framework and Checker: Automatic Generation of Reflective UML State Machine's C++ Code and Checker

Software Systems are becoming increasingly complex leading to new Validation & Verification challenges. Model checking and testing techniques are used at development time while runtime verification aims to verify that a system satisfies a given property at runtime. This second technique complements the first one. This paper presents a tool that enables the developers to generate automatically reflective UML State Machine controllers and the Runtime Safety Properties Checker (RSPC) which checks a component-based software system's safety properties defined at design phase. We address embedded systems whose software components are designed by Unified Modelling Language-State Machines (UML-SM) and their internal information can be observed in terms of model elements at runtime. RESCO (REflective State Machines-based observable software COmponents) framework, generates software components that provide this runtime observability. The checker uses software components' internal status information to check system level safety properties. The checker detects when a system safety property is violated and starts a safe adaptation process to prevent the hazardous scenario. Thus, as demonstrated in the evaluated experiment but not shown in the paper due to the space limitation, the safety of the system is enhanced

Runtime observable and adaptable UML state machines: [email protected] approach

n embedded system is a self-contained system that incorporateselements of control logic and real-world interaction. UML State Ma-chines constitute a powerful formalism to model the behaviour ofthese types of systems. In current industrial environments, the soft-ware of these embedded systems have to cope with the increasingcomplexity and robustness requirements at runtime. One way tomanage these requirements is having the software component’sbehaviour model available at runtime ([email protected]). Thus,it is possible to enhance the safety of the software component byenabling verification and adaptation at runtime. In this paper, wepresent a model-driven approach to generate software components(namely, RESCO framework), which are able both to provide theirinternal information in model terms at runtime and adapt their be-haviour automatically when an error or an unexpected situation isdetected. The aforementioned runtime introspection and adaptationabilities are added automatically to the software component and itdoes not require the developer make any extra effort. The solutionhas been tested in the design and implementation of an industrialBurner controller. Results indicate that the software components ge-nerated by the presented solution provides introspection at runtime.Thanks to this introspection ability at runtime, the software com-ponents are able to adapt automatically from their normal-modebehaviour to a safe-mode behaviour which was defined to be usedin erroneous or unexpected situations at runtime. Therefore, it ispossible to enhance the safety of the systems consisting of thesesoftware components