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Software interfaces play a crucial rule in component-based development. The Comma framework provides mature tool support for the specification and analysis of interfaces. An interface description in Comma contains a protocol state machine and it may specify timing constraints on the occurrence of interface events. For a component, constraints can be added on the relations between its interfaces. Using a Comma model as the single source of truth, many artifacts can be generated, such as visualization, documentation, code for middleware, monitors and tests.

The complexity of cyber-physical systems is increasing, driven by integration of more functionality and trends towards mass-customization. This has resulted in complex systems with many variants that require long time to develop and are difficult to adapt to changing requirements and introduction of new technology. New methodologies are hence required to reduce development time, simplify customization for a particular customer, and improve evolvability both during development and after deployment. This chapter explains how these challenges are addressed by an approach to model-based engineering (MBE) based on domainspecific languages (DSLs). However, applying the approach in industry has resulted in 5 technical research questions, namely how to: RQ1) achieve modularity and reuse in a DSL ecosystem, RQ2) achieve consistency between model and realizations, RQ3) manage an evolving DSL eco-system, RQ4) ensure model quality, RQ5) ensure quality of generated code. The five research questions are explored in the context of the published state-ofthe-art, as well as practically investigated through a case study from the defense domain.

Service-oriented systems interconnect with other systems in a time critical manner, making their performance vital. For this purpose, we propose an automated performance evaluation approach for service-oriented systems which includes both performance measurement and prediction. The approach makes use of the iDSL language, a domain specific language tailored to modeling service-oriented systems, and the iDSL toolchain to evaluate iDSL models, as follows. First, discrete-event simulation yields many performance artifacts, e.g., latency breakdown charts, cumulative distribution graphs, and latency bar charts. Second, timed automata-based model checking yields absolute latency bounds. Third, probabilistic timed automata-based model checking leads to exact latency distributions for each service. We successfully validated our approach; several case studies on interventional X-ray systems displayed similar measured and predicted outcomes.

Software maintenance consumes a significant and increasing proportion of industrial software engineering budgets, only to maintain the existing product functionality. This hinders the development of new innovative features with added value to customers. To make software development efforts more effective, legacy software needs to be rejuvenated into a substantial redesign. We show that partially-automated software rejuvenation is becoming feasible and cost-effective in industrial practice. We use domain-specific models that abstract from implementation details, and apply a pragmatic combination of manual and automated techniques. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by the rejuvenation of legacy software of the Interventional X-ray machines developed by Philips Healthcare. cop. Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

We discuss the use of formal techniques to improve the concept phase of product realisation. As an industrial application, a new concept of interventional X-ray systems has been formalized, using model checking techniques and the simulation of formal models. cop. Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

Development of computerized embedded control systems is difficult because it brings together systems theory, electrical engineering and computer science. The engineering and analysis approaches advocated by these disciplines are fundamentally different which complicates reasoning about e.g. performance at the system level. We propose a light-weight approach that alleviates this problem to some extent. An existing formal semantic framework for discrete event models is extended to allow for consistent co-simulation of continuous time models from within this framework. It enables integrated models that can be checked by simulation in addition to the verification and validation techniques already offered by each discipline individually. The level of confidence in the design can now be raised in the very early stages of the system design life-cycle instead of postponing system-level design issues until the integration and test phase is reached. We demonstrate the extended semantic framework by co-simulation of VDM++ and bond-graph models on a case study, the level control of a water tank.