Supporting Semi-Automatic Co-Evolution of Architecture and Fault Tree Models

Abstract

In this work, we report about recent research results on “Supporting Semi-Automatic Co-Evolution of Architecture and Fault Tree Models”, published in [Ge18]. During the whole life-cycle of software-intensive systems in safety-critical domains, system models must consistently co-evolve with quality evaluation models. However, performing the necessary synchronization steps is a cumbersome and often manual task prone to errors. To understand this problem in detail, we have analyzed the evolution of two representatives of system models and quality evaluation models, namely architecture and fault tree models, for a set of evolution scenarios of a factory automation system called Pick and Place Unit. We designed a set of intra- and inter-model transformation rules which fully cover the evolution scenarios of the case study and which offer the potential to semi-automate the co-evolution process. In particular, we validated these rules with respect to completeness and evaluated them by a comparison to typical visual editor operations. Our results show a significant reduction of the amount of required user interactions in order to realize the co-evolution.