Biblio

In Production System Engineering (PSE), domain experts from different disciplines reuse assets such as products, production processes, and resources. Therefore, PSE organizations aim at establishing reuse across engineering disciplines. However, the coordination of multi-disciplinary reuse tasks, e.g., the re-validation of related assets after changes, is hampered by the coarse-grained representation of tasks and by scattered, heterogeneous domain knowledge. This paper introduces the Multi-disciplinary Reuse Coordination (MRC) artifact to improve task management for multi-disciplinary reuse. For assets and their properties, the MRC artifact describes sub-tasks with progress and result states to provide references for detailed reuse task management across engineering disciplines. In a feasibility study on a typical robot cell in automotive manufacturing, we investigate the effectiveness of task management with the MRC artifact compared to traditional approaches. Results indicate that the MRC artifact is feasible and provides effective capabilities for coordinating multi-disciplinary re-validation after changes.

Software has emerged as a significant part of many domains, including financial service platforms, social networks and vehicle control. Standards organizations have responded to this by creating regulations to address issues such as safety and privacy. In this context, compliance of software with standards has emerged as a key issue. For software development organizations, compliance is a complex and costly goal to achieve and is often accomplished by producing so-called assurance cases, which demonstrate that the system indeed satisfies the property imposed by a standard (e.g., safety, privacy, security). As systems and standards undergo evolution for a variety of reasons, maintaining assurance cases multiplies the effort. In this work, we propose to exploit the connection between the field of model management and the problem of compliance management and propose methods that use model management techniques to address compliance scenarios such as assurance case evolution and reuse. For validation, we ground our approaches on the automotive domain and the ISO 26262 standard for functional safety of road vehicles.

Evolution in software systems is a necessary activity that occurs due to fixing bugs, adding functionality or improving system quality. Systems often need to be shown to comply with regulatory standards. Along with demonstrating compliance, an artifact, called an assurance case, is often produced to show that the system indeed satisfies the property imposed by the standard (e.g., safety, privacy, security, etc.). Since each of the system, the standard, and the assurance case can be presented as a model, we propose the extension and use of traditional model management operators to aid in the reuse of parts of the assurance case when the system undergoes an evolution. Specifically, we present a model management approach that eventually produces a partial evolved assurance case and guidelines to help the assurance engineer in completing it. We demonstrate how our approach works on an automotive subsystem regulated by the ISO 26262 standard.