Requirements Engineering and Architectural Modelling

Among all possible activities occurring during CPSs design, requirement engineering and architectural modelling are the most abstract of them. In INTO-CPS, an extension of the SysML profile, named INTO-CPS SysML, has been defined and implemented to support these activities.

CPSs are designed to meet a set of desired requirements. These requirements, defined by a range of different stakeholders, specify constraints and/or features of the desired CPS.  In INTO-CPS, we aid this process in two ways. Firstly, SysML model elements may be combined with plain text and Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to capture CPSs needs. In addition, a rigorous process for CPS requirements engineering has been proposed which aids a CPS engineer to use their own requirement techniques with the INTO-CPS tool chain.

CPS architectures, which at the end must verify specified requirements, are modelled by using the INTO-CPS SysML profile in terms of components, their composition and their connections. A component is “a logical or conceptual unit of the system corresponding to a software or a hardware entity”.  These components and their connections will be used as configuration of FMI 2.0 co-simulation. The INTO-CPS tool chain supports exporting FMI model descriptions to be imported into modelling simulation tools, and also exporting multi-model configurations for co-simulation.