Component and Connector Views in Practice

Abstract

We have presented an experience report of applying Component and Connector (C&C) view verification with an industrial partner, at the MoDELS 2017 conference. C&C views are a means for formal yet intuitive structural specification of C&C models. We report on our experience how C&C views and their verification help to address challenges of traceability and evolution in automotive industry. We analyzed the development process at Daimler AG and evaluated our C&C views verification tool on five Simulink models with more than 7700 subsystems in total and C&C views created for 183 textual requirements provided by Daimler AG. We describe our experience in detail and discuss a list of lessons learned, including, e.g., a missing abstraction concept in C&C models and C&C views that we have identified and added to the views language and tool, that engineers can create graphical C&C views quite easily, and how verification algorithms scale on real-size industry models. Furthermore, we report on the non-negligible technical effort needed to translate Simulink block diagrams to C&C models. We make all materials mentioned and used in our experience electronically available for inspection and further research.