Metodología de interoperabilidad basada en un lenguaje de representación unificado

Los costes económicos asociados a los problemas de interoperabilidad son bastante conocidos, aunque actualmente existen alternativas para mejorar los niveles de interoperabilidad, los desafíos de interoperabilidad siguen vigentes, prueba de ello es la prioridad que da la Unión Europea a reforzar su estrategia de interoperabilidad, esto debido que la misma es fundamental en la nueva estrategia digital de la Comisión Europea. En el contexto del proceso de ingeniería, la interoperabilidad juega un papel crítico debido a la necesidad intrínseca de conectar diferentes organizaciones, personas, métodos de ingeniería y herramientas provenientes de múltiples disciplinas. El conocimiento incrustado en los diferentes artefactos del sistema debe gestionarse bajo diferentes protocolos de comunicación, elaboración de formatos y lenguajes. Esta situación hace que sea extremadamente difícil unificar los entornos de ingeniería y explotar los datos, la información y el conocimiento generado durante el ciclo de vida del desarrollo. En este trabajo de investigación, se define, implementa y valida una metodología para unificar el acceso, intercambio y explotación de artefactos del sistema. “System Representation Language (SRL)” se especifica como un metamodelo abierto para representar cualquier tipo de contenido de artefactos del sistema. Luego, se presenta una arquitectura basada en conectores SRL como un medio para interconectar herramientas dentro de una cadena de herramientas y para proporcionar capacidades de reutilización de artefactos del sistema, la gestión de la calidad y la trazabilidad. Además, también se describe un proceso iterativo para desarrollar conectores SRL. Una vez definidas las bases teóricas y el marco tecnológico, se realizan algunos experimentos científicos para validar el enfoque presentado como método: 1) para mejorar el grado de interoperabilidad dentro de un entorno de cadena de herramientas y 2) para mostrar su aplicabilidad para brindar funciones que requieran Visión holística del sistema como reutilización, recuperación de trazabilidad o control de calidad. Finalmente, como resultado técnico de este trabajo de investigación, se introduce la integración con un conjunto de herramientas comerciales para validar la metodología y la implementación con casos de uso del mundo real.The costs associated with interoperability are well-known. Although it is possible to find different alternatives, the implementation of a interoperability strategy still remains challenging. As an example, the European Union is looking for boosting its interoperability strategy as a driver for the new digital agenda established by the European Commission. In the context of the engineering process, interoperability plays a critical role due to the intrinsic necessity of connecting different organizations, people, engineering methods and tools coming from multiple disciplines. The embedded knowledge in the different system artifacts must be managed under different communication protocols, formats and languages making. This situation makes extremely difficult to unify the engineering environments and to exploit the data, information and knowledge generated during the development lifecycle. In this research work, a methodology to unify the access, exchange and exploitation of system artifacts is defined, implemented and validated. The “System Representation Language (SRL)” is specified as an open meta-model to represent any type of system artifact content. Then, an architecture based on SRL connectors is presented as a mean to interconnect tools within a toolchain and to provide capabilities for system artifact reuse, quality management and traceability. Furthermore, an iterative process to develop SRL connectors is also described. Once the theoretical definitions and the technological framework is defined, some scientific experiments are conducted to validate the presented approach as a method: 1) to improve the degree of interoperability within a toolchain environment and 2) to show its applicability to provide functions that require a holistic view of the system such as reuse, traceability recovery or quality checking. Finally, as a technical outcome of this research work, the integration with a suite of commercial tools is introduced to validate the methodology and the implementation with real-world use cases.Programa de Doctorado en Ciencia y Tecnología Informática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Antonio de Amescua Seco.- Secretario: Alejandro Rodríguez González.- Vocal: José Emilio Labra Gay

Towards a method to quantitatively measure toolchain interoperability in the engineering lifecycle: A case study of digital hardware design

The engineering lifecycle of cyber-physical systems is becoming more challenging than ever. Multiple engineering disciplines must be orchestrated to produce both a virtual and physical version of the system. Each engineering discipline makes use of their own methods and tools generating different types of work products that must be consistently linked together and reused throughout the lifecycle. Requirements, logical/descriptive and physical/analytical models, 3D designs, test case descriptions, product lines, ontologies, evidence argumentations, and many other work products are continuously being produced and integrated to implement the technical engineering and technical management processes established in standards such as the ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288:2015 "Systems and software engineering-System life cycle processes". Toolchains are then created as a set of collaborative tools to provide an executable version of the required technical processes. In this engineering environment, there is a need for technical interoperability enabling tools to easily exchange data and invoke operations among them under different protocols, formats, and schemas. However, this automation of tasks and lifecycle processes does not come free of charge. Although enterprise integration patterns, shared and standardized data schemas and business process management tools are being used to implement toolchains, the reality shows that in many cases, the integration of tools within a toolchain is implemented through point-to-point connectors or applying some architectural style such as a communication bus to ease data exchange and to invoke operations. In this context, the ability to measure the current and expected degree of interoperability becomes relevant: 1) to understand the implications of defining a toolchain (need of different protocols, formats, schemas and tool interconnections) and 2) to measure the effort to implement the desired toolchain. To improve the management of the engineering lifecycle, a method is defined: 1) to measure the degree of interoperability within a technical engineering process implemented with a toolchain and 2) to estimate the effort to transition from an existing toolchain to another. A case study in the field of digital hardware design comprising 6 different technical engineering processes and 7 domain engineering tools is conducted to demonstrate and validate the proposed method.The work leading to these results has received funding from the H2020-ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 826452-“Arrowhead Tools for Engineering of Digitalisation Solutions” and from specific national programs and/or funding authorities. Funding for APC: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Read & Publish Agreement CRUE-CSIC 2023)

Towards Effective SysML Model Reuse

The Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is spreading very fast. Most modelling tool vendors support it and practitioners have adopted it for Systems Engineering. The number of SysML models is growing, increasing the need for and the potential benefit from platforms that allow a user to reuse the knowledge represented in the models. However, SysML model reuse remains challenging. Each tool has its own implementation of SysML, hindering reuse between tools. The search capabilities of most tools are also very limited and finding reusable models can be difficult. This paper presents our vision and initial work towards enabling an effective reuse of the knowledge contained in SysML models. The proposed solution is based on a universal information representation model called RSHP and on existing technology for indexing and retrieval. The solution has been used to index models of all SysML diagram types and preliminary validated with requirements diagrams. The results from the validation show that the solution has very high precision and recall. This makes us confident that the solution can be a suitable means for effective SysML model reuse.European CommissionThe research leading to this paper has received funding from the AMASS project (H2020-ECSEL grant agreement no 692474; Spain's MINECO ref. PCIN-2015-262)

Semantic recovery of traceability links between system artifacts

This paper introduces a mechanism to recover traceability links between the requirements and logical models in the context of critical systems development. Currently, lifecycle processes are covered by a good number of tools that are used to generate different types of artifacts. One of the cornerstone capabilities in the development of critical systems lies in the possibility of automatically recovery traceability links between system artifacts generated in different lifecycle stages. To do so, it is necessary to establish to what extent two or more of these work products are similar, dependent or should be explicitly linked together. However, the different types of artifacts and their internal representation depict a major challenge to unify how system artifacts are represented and, then, linked together. That is why, in this work, a concept-based representation is introduced to provide a semantic and unified description of any system artifact. Furthermore, a traceability function is defined and implemented to exploit this new semantic representation and to support the recovery of traceability links between different types of system artifacts. In order to evaluate the traceability function, a case study in the railway domain is conducted to compare the precision and recall of recovery traceability links between text-based requirements and logical model elements. As the main outcome of this work, the use of a concept-based paradigm to represent that system artifacts are demonstrated as a building block to automatically recover traceability links within the development lifecycle of critical systems.The research leading to these results has received funding from the H2020 ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under Grant Agreement No. 826452 \Arrowhead Tools for Engineering of Digitalisation Solutions" and from speci¯c national programs and/or funding authorities

Enabling system artefact exchange and selection through a linked data layer

The use of different techniques and tools is a common practice to cover all stages in the systems development lifecycle, generating a very good number of system artefacts. Moreover, these artefacts are commonly encoded in different formats and can only be accessed, in most cases, through proprietary and non-standard protocols. This scenario can be considered a real nightmare for software or systems reuse. Possible solutions imply the creation of a real collaborative development environment where tools can exchange and share data, information and knowledge. In this context, the OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) initiative pursues the creation of public specifications (data shapes) to exchange any artefact generated during the development lifecycle, by applying the principles of the Linked Data initiative. In this paper, the authors present a solution to provide a real multi-format system artefact reuse by means of an OSLC-based specification to share and exchange any artefact under the principles of the Linked Data initiative. Finally, two experiments are conducted to demonstrate the advantages of enabling an input/output interface based on an OSLC implementation on top of an existing commercial tool (the Knowledge Manager). Thus, it is possible to enhance the representation and retrieval capabilities of system artefacts by considering the whole underlying knowledge graph generated by the different system artefacts and their relationships. After performing 45 different queries over logical and physical models stored in Papyrus, IBM Rhapsody and Simulink, results of precision and recall are promising showing average values between 70-80%.The research leading to these results has received funding from the AMASS project (H2020-ECSEL grant agreement no 692474; Spain's MINECO ref. PCIN-2015-262) and the CRYSTAL project (ARTEMIS FP7-CRitical sYSTem engineering AcceLeration project no 332830-CRYSTAL and the Spanish Ministry of Industry)