Traceability support in embedded system development
Our industrial partner Daimler Chrysler (DC) develops embedded safety-critical systems for automobiles. For each phase of the development process DC utilizes a number of various commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) tools each of which is specialized in certain development tasks or certain aspects of the system under development. Usually, the tools used are provided by different vendors and thus are not aware of each other or integrated to any degree. Therefore, the data of a system development project as a whole is incoherently distributed over the different tool data repositories. The task of manually keeping the project data consistent is cumbersome, time consuming, and highly error prone. Furthermore, current standards such as IEC 61508 / DIN EN 61508 demand traceability support in safety-critical system development projects. In order to address these issues DC developed ToolNet Desktop. ToolNet references the data stored in different tools by providing and implementing uniform but proprietary tool interfaces which are realized as adapters to the various tool APIs. ToolNet allows for the manual creation of traceability links between data references of any adapted tool. Despite supporting the task of keeping project data consistent, the manual maintenance of the traceability links remains cumbersome, time consuming, and error prone.
Using MOFLON, we enabled DC to replace their proprietary tool interface definitions by interfaces that comply to Sun's Java Metadata Interface (JMI) standard. To this end DC imported the metamodel specifications of the tools that were to be integrated from Rational Rose into MOFLON and simply generated the desired standard compliant interfaces. Using standardized interfaces rather than their own proprietary interfaces DC can now utilize additional tools that analyze or manipulate data through JMI interfaces. Furthermore, MOFLON supports declarative specification of consistency patterns for traceability link creation and checking. The well-defined formalism of triple graph grammars that uses a QVT-like notation for specification of model integration rules is used for that purpose. This support includes the detection of new traceability links, checking existing traceability links for consistency, and enforcing consistency in case of consistency violations by means of model transformation and incremental update propagation. Finally, MOFLON provides an model integration component that is able to automatically apply the specified patterns by accessing tools' data through JMI-compliant interfaces, which has been integrated with the existing ToolNet Desktop.
