Research

Strand 1: Model Based Systems Engineering

Objectives

The primary objective of the Model Based Systems Engineering strand of the HIRTS DARP is to improve the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of current systems and software engineering activities.

The work takes an "architecture-centric" view of the development process, and emphasises the use of contracts as a way of controlling the dependencies between components (sub-systems) in the architecture. This is intended to provide a unifying theme for the three main research topics:

• Automatic generation of fault accommodation code: given models of architectures, attributes, and contracts, can code be directly generated from FMEAs? Can patterns of fault accommodation code be identified and automatically generated?
• Incremental certification: what are different approaches to using contracts in architecture, and to what extent can each be exploited for incremental certification?
• Model-driven testing: investigate tools and techniques in support of testing and certification from models. This will examine both automated test generation from models, simulation of models, and static analysis of models. It will focus on architectural models and augmenting incremental certification.

The aim will be to assess the state of industrial practise and relevant research work. It is intended that, so far as practicable, work will be done by building on existing tools used by the companies and ideas will be developed and evaluated through industrial case studies. Many of these tools are extensible, and a focus will be on identifying and recording the additional data necessary to support adequate architectural descriptions for embedded, safety-critical, real-time systems and software. In addition, effort will be put into influencing the development of regulatory and commercial standards, e.g. evolving UML definitions, as a way of ensuring that the ideas developed gain maximum acceptance in industry and by tool vendors.