ITEA REVAMP:Round-trip Engineering and VAriability Management Platform and Process

Post date: Nov 5, 2017 6:25:01 PM

Description: An ever-higher proportion of B2B and B2C products and services acquire leading market positions by becoming more software-intensive. This trend is illustrated by buildings and vehicles evolving from electro-mechanical systems into Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS, thereafter) (Lee, 2015) and by services such as utilities, transportation and tourism evolving towards personalized, adaptive offers based on analytics of data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT, thereafter). (Madisetti, 2014). This technological trend mutually reinforces with the concurrent business model trend to shift away from one-shot product sale transactions towards service subscription packages, which include leasing a product as one item in a customized turn-key service offer.

These Software-Intensive Systems and Services (SIS thereafter) create and adapt to innovative market disruptions and customer whims far quicker and at lower cost than their less software based competitors. However, they also raise new engineering challenges. In particular, they require more agile, round-trip engineering processes that better leverage legacy assets, and more systematic and automated variability management.

REVaMP² aims to conceive, develop and evaluate the first comprehensive automation tool-chain and associated executable process to support round-trip engineering of SIS Product Lines (PL, thereafter) (CMU-SEI, 2015). The first main end result of the project will be a prototype REVaMP² platform seamlessly integrating the following SIS Round-Trip PL Engineering (SIS RT PLE, thereafter) automation services:

 Extraction of a SIS PL and variability model from legacy assets of implicitly related SIS sets;

 Multi-view visualization of legacy assets, extracted variability models and PL assets;

 Verification that a SIS PL satisfies a set of hard constraints such as safety constraints;

 Refactoring of a SIS PL to optimize soft constraints on the refactored assets such as full exploitation of multi-core processor power and to co-evolve related assets such as software algorithms and the hardware architectures on which they run.

By taking meta-models as parameters to generic algorithms, these services will be able to analyse or generate a wide spectrum of CPS engineering assets: requirements, system models, software models and code, computing hardware models and mechatronic sensor and actuator models. The second main end result of the project will be an executable model of the SIS RT PLE process to fully leverage the automation services provided by the REVaMP² tool-chain.

CPS and IoT-based SIS are two areas with very high expected growth in the next decade. The IoT-based SIS market is expected to grow 26.59% yearly to generate revenues of over $1.8M by 2020. As these new types of SIS PL spread across key economic sectors like manufacturing, utilities, construction, transportation, health care, etc., so will the demand for tool-chains such as REVaMP². This is due to higher levels of automation and reuse of legacy assets provided by the REVaMP² methods and tools, which enables more agile, reliable, and cost-efficient processes than current State-of-the-Art (SotA, thereafter) SIS PLE tool chains support.

The REVaMP² consortium brings together: (a) research teams demonstrators of SIS RT PLE automation proof-of-concept, (b) industrial tool-chain contributors for requirements, system, software, computing hardware and mechatronic engineering plus project and variability management and (c) providers of industrial SIS RT PLE use cases, covering domains such as the transportation CPS industry, the ES industry, the tourism industry and others. The industrial partners include SMEs and industrial giants (such as ABB, AVL-SFR, Bosch, Siemens, Scania, SAAB and Thales).

SOFTEAM's role: The prime coordinator. Implementation of variability tools with Modelio.

Web Site: http://rd.softeam.com/projects