Executing model-based software development for embedded I4.0 devices properly

Technical interoperability in “Industrie 4.0” scenarios is currently being achieved by standards such as OPC UA. Such standards allow operators to use a common communication interface for heterogeneous production devices. However, production flexibility (e.g. self-configuration or dynamic self-adaptation) can only be achieved if system structure and engineering processes change. At the moment, traditional engineering processes for embedded systems generate communication interfaces from software. This stands in stark contrast to component-based software engineering approaches. In this paper, we introduce a tool-based software engineering approach that puts models back at the core of embedded system development. This approach enables flexible production scenarios by bringing together process-oriented software development and operator-oriented interface construction

Contracts for Systems Design: Theory

Aircrafts, trains, cars, plants, distributed telecommunication military or health care systems,and more, involve systems design as a critical step. Complexity has caused system design times and coststo go severely over budget so as to threaten the health of entire industrial sectors. Heuristic methods andstandard practices do not seem to scale with complexity so that novel design methods and tools based on astrong theoretical foundation are sorely needed. Model-based design as well as other methodologies suchas layered and compositional design have been used recently but a unified intellectual framework with acomplete design flow supported by formal tools is still lacking.Recently an “orthogonal” approach has been proposed that can be applied to all methodologies introducedthus far to provide a rigorous scaffolding for verification, analysis and abstraction/refinement: contractbaseddesign. Several results have been obtained in this domain but a unified treatment of the topic that canhelp in putting contract-based design in perspective is missing. This paper intends to provide such treatmentwhere contracts are precisely defined and characterized so that they can be used in design methodologiessuch as the ones mentioned above with no ambiguity. In addition, the paper provides an important linkbetween interface and contract theories to show similarities and correspondences.This paper is complemented by a companion paper where contract based design is illustrated throughuse cases