Providing Guidance in an Interdisciplinary Model-Based Design Process

When developing real-time embedded systems, various professional disciplines are involved. Concerning AAS (assistance and automotive systems) in the automotive domain, the project DeSCAS (Design of Safety-Critical Automotive Systems) has identified the design streams functional development and architecture, safety measures and human factors. What has been proposed are an interwoven development process and related methodologies to cope with these different design streams and their domain specific terminology, models, methods and tools. A key aspect in the proposed methodology is formalizing domain knowledge using OWL (Web Ontology Language) [4] ontologies. Reasoning is applied to support analysis steps (impact analysis as well as hazard and risk analysis) and infer consequences of design decisions for a single stream or for the entire development process. This paper describes a toolchain prototype implementation which is used to summarize lessons learned from practical insights. The toolchain currently interweaves two development streams: functional development and architecture activities with management of safety measures. A simple emergency braking system is modeled as an example application of an assistance and automation system to illustrate the proposed proceeding.