Verification of behavioral compatibility in the Virtual Integration methodology

Abstract

The advantages of component-based systems include reuse of generic components as well as adaption through variants. However, they bare a high risk of containing incompatibilities between components, due to the lack of control over the integration-relevant aspects of their components. Current development processes are able to detect incompatibilities between components only at very late stages of system development. The Virtual Integration methodology is an approach to detect and to solve compatibility issues during early stages of system design. The methodology supports developers with a set of measures to reduce the risk of incompatibilities to a minimum at each abstraction layer of their system architecture. Realtime requirements of embedded systems make it necessary to support the methodology with a formal model, which can describe dynamic properties of these systems. In our approach, we use interface automata because they offer a lightweight formalism to describe the behavior of components and to verify their compatibility based on these descriptions. In a feasibility study we show, to which extend interface automata are adequate for the foresaid purpose in the automotive application field.