Incremental Consistency Checking in Delta-oriented UML-Models for Automation Systems
This work addresses incremental consistency checking for automation system designers, but it appears to be an incremental extension of prior modeling approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of managing complexity and ensuring consistency in evolving automation systems by developing an efficient consistency checking method across multiple UML modeling perspectives and after delta applications, though no concrete performance numbers are provided.
Automation systems exist in many variants and may evolve over time in order to deal with different environment contexts or to fulfill changing customer requirements. This induces an increased complexity during design-time as well as tedious maintenance efforts. We already proposed a multi-perspective modeling approach to improve the development of such systems. It operates on different levels of abstraction by using well-known UML-models with activity, composite structure and state chart models. Each perspective was enriched with delta modeling to manage variability and evolution. As an extension, we now focus on the development of an efficient consistency checking method at several levels to ensure valid variants of the automation system. Consistency checking must be provided for each perspective in isolation, in-between the perspectives as well as after the application of a delta.