Towards safe data flow processing by integration of design by contract in deterministic UML activities

Data flow processing is a common task of embedded systems which is usually modeled as a pipeline. Errors in a block of this pipeline can be propagated through it thus leading to unexpected and erroneous behaviors. For safety related applications, this pipeline has to be able to identify and react to failures. The DMOSES model-driven development method uses deterministic UML activities to describe and implement data flow processing. This method ensures deterministic behavior of concurrent processing. Design by Contract defines formal, precise and verifiable interfaces for software components. We propose a development method for safe data flow processing based on the integration of this concept in deterministic UML activities. This integration allows the identification of errors by detection of contracts violation. This paper presents an extension of the DMOSES tool for contracts verification at the model level and their monitoring at runtime.