Contract-based methods and activities in the validation of interfaces for System of Systems

One of the key challenges in System of Systems Engineering is the validation of System of Systems (SoS). In a SoS the interfaces between the systems need to be defined as early as possible in the product development process. Contracts may help to define and specify interfaces in an early phase of the product development and support the validation of interfaces. This contribution applies existing methods, analysis and synthesis activities for the contract-based validation of interfaces between vehicle and infrastructure as an exemplary SoS. Hereby, Model-Based Systems Engineering supports the use of contract-based validation with specific methods and activities. Three different virtual and mixed physical-virtual validation environments - each for the Vehicle-to-Everything use case of an intersection scenario - enable the verification of the applied methods and activities. Two of these are virtual containing MATLAB and MATLAB-Network Simulator 3 Co-Simulation, respectively. The third is a mixed physical-virtual validation environment, including a driving robot. It realizes the exchange of information between a BMW i3 on a roller test bench and the vehicle simulation environment in CarMaker.