Explicit Modelling of Physical Measures: From Event-B to Java

TL;DR

This paper proposes an engineering approach to explicitly model physical measures throughout the development of cyber-physical systems, ensuring semantic coherence from formal models to implementation.

Contribution

It introduces a method for explicitly representing physical measures in formal models and their translation to Java, addressing heterogeneity and incoherence issues.

Findings

Explicit measurement modeling improves semantic clarity.

Method ensures consistent interpretation of physical values.

Facilitates reliable system development from formal models to code.

Abstract

The increasing development of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) requires modellers to represent and reason about physical values. This paper addresses two major, inter-related, aspects that arise when modelling physical measures. Firstly, there is often a heterogeneity of representation; for example: speed can be represented in many different units (mph, kph, mps, etc. . . ). Secondly, there is incoherence in composition; for example: adding a speed to a temperature would provide a meaningless result in the physical world, even though such a purely mathematical operation is meaningful in the abstract. These aspects are problematic when implicit semantics - concerned with measurements - in CPSs are not explicit (enough) in the requirements, design and implementation models. We present an engineering approach for explicitly modelling measurements during all phases of formal system development. We illustrate this by moving from Event-B models to Java implementations, via object oriented design.