CONSISTENT INTEGRATION OF SYSTEM AND SOFTWARE MODELS AT DIFFERENT LEVELS OF ABSTRACTION

Due to numerous domain needs, aspects and requirements, various preferences and diversity of organizations, development of complex embedded systems mostly requires using many different tools and modeling languages. Since corresponding data is repeated in multiple models, at different levels of abstraction and expressed in different modeling languages, it is very challenging to keep these models consistent and up to date as the system evolves. A case study from one of Volvo CE’s vehicles has been used to identify and investigate the relation between models in an actual case. With the aim of improving the development process of embedded systems, the gap between models describing different aspects of the system has been addressed. An existing example of one system function has been analyzed and discussed. SysML models and Simulink models of the function were examined in order to identify dependencies between them. After the dependencies were found, they have been generalized into a list of various dependency types. During the case study, it has been noticed that these models are not one-to-one related which makes the automatic conversion between them harder, and a number of gaps between SysML and Simulink models were identified. Further, possible ways of improvements are proposed in order to achieve a consistent integration of system and software models at different levels of abstraction