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SPEEDS

FP6 IST IP-033471, 2006-2010

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Introduction

The SPEEDS project aims at significant improvements of productivity and competitiveness of the European industry in the fields of embedded system- and component design, design-quality, testing and integration and certification of avionics / electronics applications. SPEEDS builds on existing standards like SysML. It defines modelling concepts, methodologies and analysis methods while incorporating them in an environment of commercial development tools.

Objectives

Problems addressed The problems addressed by SPEEDS are:

How to reach a system design solution in a multi-dimensional, concurrent, and multi-disciplinary development environment.
How to overcome multi-dimensional constraints (e.g. safety, reliability, maintainability, resource usage, cost, time, etc.).
How to overcome concurrent, multi-disciplinary, and cross-organizational environment and ensure robust and flexible design (including manufacturers / suppliers cooperation).
How to provide cost-efficient mapping of applications and product variants onto embedded platforms.
How to manage risk in design caused by missing or unstable requirements and design uncertainty.

Approach SPEEDS intends reaching its objective by enhancing model-based systems engineering with

Semantics-based modelling to
— Support the design of complex embedded systems using heterogeneous sub-system models, and
— Enable sound integration of existing and new tools.
Novel formal analysis tools and techniques that will allow to explore architectural implementation alternatives and “first-time-right” design using the “design-by-contract” paradigm.
A new tools-supported design process, the “Controlled Speculative Design”, that will minimize the risks of concurrent design activities, by providing a trustworthy development environment through the definition of formal contracts between design groups.

SPEEDS Core Concepts

The HRC Metamodel Overall, HRC (Heterogeneous Rich Components) meta-model is a open model model and has been constructed to seamlessly extend the capabilities of existing industry-specific system engineering meta-models like AUTOSAR and AADL. HRC forms the foundations for a component based construction of complete virtual system models. SPEEDS supports a concept of coarse grained integration of COTS tools via the meta-model.

To use the SPEEDS concepts in a cooperative environment – different teams using different tools – a common platform is needed to exchange data. The SPEEDS approach is based on:

1. the users’ view of design entities, as represented in COTS tools familiar to today’s designers in the market segments addressed by SPEEDS.
2. an HRC representation, independent of COTS tools, which allows the representation of hierarchical component systems by supporting rich and heteregeneous composition by means of interaction models that are either synchronous or "rich" like in BIP
3. the SPEEDS semantic foundations ensures the overall consistency of the SPEEDS approach and the basis for the analysis techniques developed during the project.

Contract-based analysis One of the main concepts of HRC is a notion of contract which allows attaching to a component contracts, expressing on one hand an assumption on the environment and on the other a promise which the component must realize. Such contracts may be associated with view points where different view points may be of interest for different design teams.

Analysis is formal reasoning about the system’s overall integrity and properties using the virtual HRC model. Analysis is especially promising in SPEEDS as it processes the contracts which exist before the system is implemented.

SPEEDS academic partners are developing analysis techniques for typical engineering integrity questions, e.g.

Dominance: Dominance analysis is used
— within a refinement step (Making a requirement more concrete and in this sense stronger than the starting one).
— within a decomposition/composition step to check that the system contract is dominated by the “composition” of the contracts of its components (virtual integration).
Compatibility: Compatibility checking is an analysis service that is able to check whether two or more contracts are compatible. If we want to combine several components together to form a new system, the associated contracts of the individual components should be compatible meaning that they fit together.

SPEEDS Engineering environment for getting work done The SPEEDS engineering environment combines modelling tools together with a seto of analysis tools. Engineering activities are guided by a Process Advisor. All are working on a common data basis the SPEEDS Repository (see this figure).

The SPEEDS BUS is responsible to connect tools and services that must work together on a design. For this integration it offers a well defined API (the SPEEDS Bus Service Layer) through which all tools are connected. Using this API the SPEEDS Engineering Environment is open to integrate additional tools – design tools as well as analysis tools. While the SPEEDS bus is the central point of tool interaction, the SPEEDS model repository is the unique data storage for all tools, the storage being itself a tool providing services.