Extendable toolchain for automatic compatibility checks

Embedded software systems are highly configurable and consist of many software components in different variants and versions. However, component updates or upgrades often result in unpredictable incompatibilities with its environment. Existing research addresses this challenge by employing formal methods with a fixed set of encoded static compatibility checks, making it nearly impossible for engineers to add new or modify existing ones. This paper presents a highly adaptable infrastructure to define constraints for compatibility checks. The underlying approach transforms software components into instances of a C&C meta-model, enriched with OCL compatibility constraints at runtime, then evaluated by a solver. The result is transformed back into a C&C model showing compatibility or incompatibility. The easy to integrate infrastructure is based on industrial requirements and allows to add, modify or delete constraints without restarting the tool infrastructure