Combining Semi-Formal and Formal Methods for the Development of Distributed Reconfigurable Control Systems

This research paper deals with combining semi-formal and formal methods to develop distributed reconfigurable control systems. The reconfiguration consists in modifying the system behavior to adapt it to the changes in its related environment caused by user needs and operating constraints. A DRCS which consists of networked reconfigurable control systems (RCSs), is a set of functional operations such that only a subset is executed by adding or removing operations after a well-defined reconfiguration scenario. To dynamically handle reconfiguration scenarios at run-time, a defined multi-agent architecture is proposed and affects a reconfiguration agent (RA) for the local reconfiguration of each RCS and a global coordination agent to harmonize the different RCSs for a required coherence. To provide a documented and safe reconfigurable system, we propose a new methodology called DRec-UML-B that covers all software development phases from modeling and verification to code generation using UML and B. The DRec-UML-B development process consists of two complementary phases: UML specification and B specification. In the first phase, we model the different agents with UML to specify the static and dynamic aspects of the DRCS. The second phase translates the UML specification to obtain the B abstract model using defined DRec-rules and reduces the number of operations to be transformed from a UML class diagram to B ones. Then, we apply successive refinements to obtain the C code and we check the system using Atelier B and Check R-B tools for the consistency and accuracy of the specification, refinement, and code generation levels to avoid the redundant control of B machines that share similar sequences of operations. We apply all the proposed contributions to two benchmark production systems FESTO and EnAS to discuss the benefits of DRec-UML-B methodology in terms of the number of generated B operations.