On design-time modelling and verification of safety-critical component-based systems

Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE) is currently a key paradigm used for developing safety-critical systems. It provides a fundamental means to master systems complexity, by allowing to design systems parts (i.e., components) for reuse and by allowing to develop those parts independently. One of the main challenges of introducing CBSE in this area is to ensure the integrity of the overall system after building it from individual components, since safety-critical systems require a rigorous development and qualification process to be released for the operation. Although the topic of compositional modelling and verification in the context of component-based systems has been studied intensively in the last decade, there is currently still a lack of tools and methods that can be applied practically and that consider major related systems quality attributes such as usability and scalability. In this paper, we present a novel approach for design-time modelling and verification of safety-critical systems, based on data semantics of components. We describe the composition, i.e., the systems design, and the underlying properties of components as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) and perform the verification by solving that problem. We show that CSP can be successfully applied for the verification of compositions for many types of properties. In our experimental setup we also show how the proposed verification scales with regard to the complexity of different system configurations. © 2014, Atlantis Press. All rights reserved.