Research Projects
SFB 1608 CONVIDE: Consistency in the View-based Development of Cyber-physical Systems
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)1 integrate computational processes with physical processes. Different
systems are summarised in this term, from cars, trains, and aircrafts to modern smart home systems. These
systems must meet requirements of openness, connectivity, increased software-implemented functionality,
flexible configurability, dependability2, and resilience, all in a cost-effective way, and during all phases of
their life-time. The limitations of current CPS design approaches become obvious when trying to fulfil these
requirements simultaneously. The central concept to cope with the ever-increasing complexity of CPS,
alongside functional decomposition, is the definition of views which enable the specialisation of developer
roles. While dealing with component dependencies is well researched, the unsolved scientific challenge of
view consistency is the central reason for the above-mentioned trade-offs between configurability, functionality,
dependability, and cost-effectiveness.
The aim of this CRC is to develop a general, comprehensive understanding of view consistency and
mechanisms to detect and, when possible, automatically or interactively resolve consistency violations
between views in CPS design. Therefore, we will investigate how to extend, generalise and transfer work in
the area of view consistency in software engineering to systems engineering. The CRC will be formed around
the methodological core of a so-called virtual single underlying meta-model that has been investigated by
the applicants. We see a window of opportunity as elaborated meta-models of non-software domains are
now being standardised. This gives us the chance to research the extension of our software engineering
approach to non-software views of CPS.
We will concurrently work on three research areas: In research area A (Formalising Consistency), we
will formalise different kinds of consistency and investigate their properties, according to needs of the other
research areas. These insights are reflected in research area B (Achieving Consistency) in the definition
of fundamental mechanisms for consistency management such as defining view types, concurrent editing,
and handling inconsistencies. In research area C (Engineering with Consistency), we will deliver objectives
to the other research areas and validate their results by investigating the use of consistency management
to address existing challenges in CPS design that can benefit from consistency management, such as
handling dependencies in product generation development, supporting evolution and testing of product lines,
or incremental homologation. In the first funding period (Understanding Consistency Management), we
will concentrate on a small set of views. We aim to answer fundamental scientific questions concerning
the inclusion of non-software views. In the second funding period (Scaling Consistency Management),
we will generalise our approach to maintain consistency of a larger, more realistic number of views to a
second application area to understand domain-specific needs. In the third phase (Building on Consistency
Management), we want to create new agile methods for the development and evolution of highly-configurable,
yet dependable CPS with fast update cycles that overcome the mentioned trade-offs between configurability,
functionality, dependability and cost-effectiveness.
- Funded by: DFG
- Contact person: Karl Kegel
- Project Website: link
- Funding period: 10/2023 - 06/2027