Viewpoints and Views in Hardware Platform Modeling for Safe Deployment

Abstract

Future cyber-physical systems will behave smart, i.e., they will provide self-* properties and collaborate with each other. Software realizes this smart behavior. In modern cars, a hardware platform consists of up to 100 networked electronic control units (ECUs) that execute the software. As the amount of safety-critical software increases, the task of describing a suitable hardware platform for deploying safety-critical software components to ECUs becomes more complicated. Existing approaches for the definition of a hardware platform do not address the different stakeholder's concerns and do not provide a systematic method. This leads to an error-prone development. In this paper, we identify viewpoints for the stakeholder's concerns and provide a method for the multi-view modeling of hardware platforms. In addition, we support hierarchical and variable horizontal composition of hardware platforms by transferring concepts from component-based software engineering. To test our method, we use an Arduino-based cooperative adaptive cruise control system.