OCL Tools Report based on the IDE4OCL Feature Model

Previously we have developed the idea of an Integrated Development Environment for OCL (IDE4OCL). Based on the OCL community's feedback we have also designed and published an IDE4OCL feature model. Here we present a report on selected OCL tools developed by the authors and their teams. Each author gives an overview of their OCL tool, provides a top level architecture, and gives an evaluation of the tool features in a web framework. The framework can also be used by other potential OCL users and tool developers. For users it may serve as an aid to choose a suitable tool for their OCL use scenarios. For tool developers it provides a comparative view for further development of the OCL tools. Our plans are to maintain the collected data and extend this web framework by further OCL tools. Additionally, we would like to encourage sharing of OCL development resources

Model Driven Engineering and Dependability Analyses: The Topcased Approach

International audienceModel Driven Engineering approaches are widely promoted to overcome difficulties to design, validate and maintain large complex systems. They present interesting dependability characteristics especially in terms of prevention of design faults and validation of design correctness. However industrial needs, practices and applicable standards impose constraints on the dependability activities to perform and justify. Therefore it is necessary to analyze how a complete dependability and safety process can be integrated with model-driven approaches within a seamless global process: which dependability activities are naturally covered or facilitated by model-driven approaches, and which additional activities are needed with which support. This paper presents the results of a study aiming at the establishment of requirements to model-driven engineering methods and tools, to support dependability analyses

Model-based dependability analysis : state-of-the-art, challenges and future outlook

Abstract: Over the past two decades, the study of model-based dependability analysis has gathered significant research interest. Different approaches have been developed to automate and address various limitations of classical dependability techniques to contend with the increasing complexity and challenges of modern safety-critical system. Two leading paradigms have emerged, one which constructs predictive system failure models from component failure models compositionally using the topology of the system. The other utilizes design models - typically state automata - to explore system behaviour through fault injection. This paper reviews a number of prominent techniques under these two paradigms, and provides an insight into their working mechanism, applicability, strengths and challenges, as well as recent developments within these fields. We also discuss the emerging trends on integrated approaches and advanced analysis capabilities. Lastly, we outline the future outlook for model-based dependability analysis

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Formal Verification Integration Approach for DSML

International audienceThe application of formal methods (especially, model check- ing and static analysis techniques) for the verification of safety critical embedded systems has produced very good results and raised the inter- est of system designers up to the application of these technologies in real size projects. However, these methods usually rely on specific verifica- tion oriented formal languages that most designers do not master. It is thus mandatory to embed the associated tools in automated verification toolchains that allow designers to rely on their usual domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs) while enjoying the benefits of these power- ful methods. More precisely, we propose a language to formally express system requirements and interpret verification results so that system designers (DSML end-users) avoid the burden of learning some formal verification technologies. Formal verification is achieved through trans- lational semantics. This work is based on a metamodeling pattern for executable DSML that favors the definition of generative tools and thus eases the integration of tools for new DSML

Mapping SysML to modelica to validate wireless sensor networks non-functional requirements

International audienceWireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have registered a large success in the scientific and industrial communities for their broad application domains. Furthermore, the WSN specification is a complex task considering to their distributed and embedded nature and the strong interactions between their hardware and software parts. Moreover, most of approaches use semi-formal methods to design systems and generally simulation to validate their properties in order to produce models without errors and conform to the system specifications. In this context, we propose a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach to improve the verification of the WSN properties. This approach combines the advantages of the System Modeling Language (SysML) and the Modelica language which promote the reusability and improve the development process. In this work, we specify a model transformation from SysML static, dynamic and requirement diagrams to their corresponding elements in Modelica. Thanks to the SysML requirement diagram which is transformed into Modelica properties (constraints), we propose a technique using dynamic tests to verify WSN properties. We have used the Topcased platform to implement our approach 1 and chosen a crossroads monitoring system which is based on wireless sensors to illustrate it. Besides, we have verified and validated some wireless sensors properties of the studied system

Open-DO: Open Framework for Critical Systems

Critical systems development pushes software quality to the extreme. When human life depends on the correct operation of the software, strict processes are put in place to ensure, as much as possible, the absence of errors in the airborne system. These processes are very tool-demanding, and these tools also need to follow stringent and rigorous guidelines to provide the proper guarantees of quality. The Open-DO initiative aims at providing a framework federating open-source tools for safety-critical systems. A key point is that these tools will come with the material to ensure that industrial users can trust their output and use them to develop software compliant to the highest integrity levels

An Approach Combining Simulation and Verification for SysML using SystemC and Uppaal

International audienceEnsuring the correction of heterogeneous and complex systems is an essential stage in the process of engineering systems.In this paper we propose a methodology to verify and validate complex systems specified with SysML language using a combination of the two techniques of simulation and verification. We translate SysML specifications into SystemC models to validate the designed systems by simulation, then we propose to verify the derived SystemC models by using the Uppaal model checker. A case study is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach

Compilation of Heterogeneous Models: Motivations and Challenges

International audienceThe widespread use of model driven engineering in the development of software-intensive systems, including high-integrity embedded systems, gave rise to a "Tower of Babel" of modeling languages. System architects may use languages such as OMG SysML and MARTE, SAE AADL or EAST-ADL; control and command engineers tend to use graphical tools such as MathWorks Simulink/Stateflow or Esterel Technologies SCADE, or textual languages such as MathWorks Embedded Matlab; software engineers usually rely on OMG UML; and, of course, many in-house domain specific languages are equally used at any step of the development process. This heterogeneity of modeling formalisms raises several questions on the verification and code generation for systems described using heterogeneous models: How can we ensure consistency across multiple modeling views? How can we generate code, which is optimized with respect to multiple modeling views? How can we ensure model-level verification is consistent with the run-time behavior of the generated executable application?In this position paper we describe the motivations and challenges of analysis and code generation from heterogeneous models when intra-view consistency, optimization and safety are major concerns. We will then introduce Project P 2 and Hi-MoCo 3-respectively FUI and Eurostars-funded collaborative projects tackling the challenges above. This work continues and extends, in a wider context, the work carried out by the Gene-Auto 4 project [1], [2]. Hereby we will present the key elements of Project P and Hi-MoCo, in particular: (i) the philosophy for the identification of safe and minimal practical subsets of input modeling languages; (ii) the overall architecture of the toolsets, the supported analysis techniques and the target languages for code generation; and finally, (iii) the approach to cross-domain qualification for an open-source, community-driven toolset