From Software Architecture Structure and Behavior Modeling to Implementations of Cyber-Physical Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a code generation framework for modeling cyber-physical systems using MontiArcAutomaton, enabling formal analysis, graphical editing, and deployment across platforms with four specialized code generators.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive code generation framework for MontiArcAutomaton models, facilitating formal analysis, editing, and deployment of CPS models.

Findings

Four code generators developed for MontiArcAutomaton models

Framework supports formal analysis, graphical editing, and deployment

Discussion of challenges in code generator development

Abstract

Software development for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a sophisticated activity as these systems are inherently complex. The engineering of CPS requires composition and interaction of diverse distributed software modules. Describing both, a systems architecture and behavior in integrated models, yields many advantages to cope with this complexity: the models are platform independent, can be decomposed to be developed independently by experts of the respective fields, are highly reusable and may be subjected to formal analysis. In this paper, we introduce a code generation framework for the MontiArcAutomaton modeling language. CPS are modeled as Component & Connector architectures with embedded I/O! automata. During development, these models can be analyzed using formal methods, graphically edited, and deployed to various platforms. For this, we present four code generators based on the MontiCore code generation framework, that implement the transformation from MontiArcAutomaton models to Mona (formal analysis), EMF Ecore (graphical editing), and Java and Python (deployment. Based on these prototypes, we discuss their commonalities and differences as well as language and application specific challenges focusing on code generator development.