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Today, many products and product components contain both hardware and software. Such products and product components are called “systems”. The increasing deployment of systems can be observed in many industries (e.g., automomotive, avionics, energy, manufacturing and medical) as well as in consumer products.
Systems whose malfunction could cause severe injuries or death of humans are called “safety-critical systems”. The international standard IEC 61508 as well as derived industry-specific standards (e.g., ISO 26262 for the automotive industry) describe which works have to be performed and which work products have to be produced during the technical development of a safety-critical system. These work products include
– a system definition as the starting point of the technical development,
– a hazard analysis of the system to be developed,
as well as – at system, hardware and software level –
– requirement specifications,
– architecture, design and interface specifications,
– integration test specifications,
– requirement-based test specifications, and
– various failure and safety analyses.
For quality assurance reasons, it is highly recommended that these work products are also produced when the system to be developed is not safety-critical.
– provides industry-specific templates for the work products mentioned above,
– automates content generation in these work products as much as possible,
– ensures consistency of the content of all work products, and
– highlights wrong or missing manual entries in the work products.
Due to these software features, the technical works yet to be done as well as the impact of detailed design decisions or detailed design changes on the technical works already done and the technical works yet to be done are made transparent at every stage of a system development project. With the help of the autoConform® Software Suite, systems engineering is made easier and faster, and a high quality of the systems engineering work products can be achieved.
The technical development of a complex product or system is usually done by a team of several professional disciplines. Even if systems and software engineering are model-based, the majority of the team members will not work on system or software modelling. Instead, they will work on other work products such as requirements documents, design specifications documents, interface specifications documents, or test case specifications documents. Each work product should be well-structured, self-contained and free of unnecessary information – in addition to being consistent with all other work products. The autoConform® Software Suite has been designed to achieve this.
It must be ensured that the product or system under development will be safe and will work reliably. This is achieved by a technical product or system development process which, from the very beginning, is based on a model of the current product or system design and which is accompanied by repeated model-based design analyses so that design errors are spotted as early as possible. Using the autoConform® Software Suite, these analyses are highly automated and fully integrated into the model-based product or system development process.
It is important that the primary system and software models are executable (and thus testable by means of simulation). If architectural and design views other than the block-oriented structure of a Simulink model are needed, then these views can be created in SysML® or UML® ². We call such views “secondary” or “auxiliary” system and software models.
The autoConform® Software Suite is a command-based tool. Each command corresponds to an obvious task which, without the autoConform® Software Suite, would have to be carried out manually. The available commands can be listed, their names are self-explanatory, and the commands do not require any arguments. Therefore, very little learning is needed to use the autoConform® Software Suite successfully.
The autoConform® Software Suite contains commands that create, synchronize or update not individual items within a work product, but an entire work product such as a particular kind of safety analysis, a requirements document, or a test case specifications document. The structure of each generated work product follows the structure of the current version of the Product or System Model and is thus easily comprehensible. Within this structure, system, hardware and software levels are clearly discerned. Furthermore, the autoConform® Software Suite is designed for correctness, especially with regard to the natural language outputs it produces. In addition, the autoConform® Software Suite aims to ensure consistency and completeness of all work products and highlights data that appear to be inconsistent or missing.
automated conformance GmbH
Kolbestrasse 37
D – 90425 Nürnberg (Nuremberg)
Germany
