Automated Consistency Preservation in Electronics Development of Cyber-Physical Systems

摘要

Computer-aided development of complex cyber-physical systems usually takes place in engineering teams with several different expert roles using a range of various software tools. This results in numerous artifacts created during this process. However, these artifacts commonly contain plenty of overlapping information. Therefore, the editing of one model by a developer may lead to inconsistencies with other models. Keeping these artifacts manually consistent is time-consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we present an automated strategy to ensure consistency between two widely used categories of software tools in electrical engineering: an electronic design automation application for designing printed circuit boards (PCBs) and an electronic circuit simulator tool to predict system behavior at runtime. Coupling these two types of tools provides the developers with the ability of efficiently testing and optimizing the behavior of the electric circuit during the PCB design process. For the proper preservation of consistency, assigning the model elements correctly between different tools is required. To avoid the disadvantages of ambiguous heuristic matching methods, we present a strategy based on annotated identifiers in order to ensure a reliable assignment of these model elements. We have implemented the described approach by using Eagle CAD as PCB software and Matlab/Simulink with the Simscape extension as the simulation tool.