A Semantic Model for Computer-Based Spatio-temporal Systems

Over the last decades lots of techniques have been developed for modeling, analyzing, and verifying software. For embedded or computer-based systems, however, the software is only one part of the entire system, which often has little or no meaning when examined in isolation without considering the remaining parts of the system. This makes it hard, if not impossible, to judge the correctness of software without a thorough understanding of its environment. A natural solution to this problem is to not only capture the software part but the entire system by suitable design models. However, to be useful such a model has to be supported by semantics which unambiguously define its meaning. In this paper we present such a semantic model which captures temporal and spatial aspects of a system, which are important if the system deals with the manipulation of rigid objects, as typically found in the domain of industrial automation.