Modeling collaborations with dynamic structural adaptation in mechatronic UML

Abstract

The next generation of advanced mechatronic systems is expected to behave more intelligently than today's systems. These systems are expected to enhance their functionality and improve their performance by building communities of autonomous agents which exploit local and global networking. Such mechatronic systems will therefore include complex coordination protocols which require execution in real-time and reconfiguration of the locally employed control algorithms at runtime to adjust their behavior to the changing system goals leading to self-adaptation. In this paper we will present an extension of the MECHATRONIC UML approach which will enable us to model collaborations between components which include structural adaptation and multi-ports. Besides the modeling of complex collaborations and the rules to join and leave these collaborations via ports and multi-ports, we propose to employ hierarchical state machines with a dynamic number of submachines to model the behavior of the multi-ports. For the collaborations this involves the related protocols, while for the components we have to refine this behavior to ensure a proper synchronization with other parts of the component behavior.