Simplification and Verification of Software and Data Structure Models in the Engineering Domain

During the past decade, much effort has been invested in developing standards to overcome data and software interoperability barriers in the oil and gas industry. Whereas syntactical integration is no longer problem, semantic integration still remains an open challenge. To overcome this problem, standards provide more and more complex structures to capture the semantics of different domains. As standards become more expressive, they may become too complex so that their adaptation is inherently difficult, which may even lead to inconsistencies in specifications. This paper addresses these issues by simplification and verification of correctness properties on an interoperability standard. While the simplification has been achieved by means of multi-level modeling, the accuracy of an industry model has been addressed by verifying the correctness properties using the object-oriented rule-based system Flora-2. Transformation and verification rules were evaluated and their performance has been enhanced by applying algorithmic improvements. The outcomes show that the approach reduces complexity of specifications and supports the verification from a software engineering point of view to simplify the adoption of standards.