Milestone 6 Update 

The MAENAD project has reached milestone 6 and completed its second year. We would like to tell you about a recent workshop, EAST-ADL progress, our case studies and tooling.

Public Workshop

The ITEA and FP7 projects AMALTHEA, MAENAD, SAFE and TIMMO-2-USE had a common workshop in Berlin in September. Around 80 participants attended, and were presented with results and plans from the projects. The theme was challenges and solutions in the areas of methodology, representation and tooling. A large demo area provided possibilities to see and discuss tools and examples. Common issues were identified and possible cooperations defined.

LinkedIn group

A LinkedIn group for EAST-ADL has been created, where we will post these newsletters, and other announcements  and we welcome you to join and start discussions related to EAST-ADL. 

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/EASTADL-4639096

Language and profile update

Several required language changes and refinements have been identified. On the one hand, this includes updates required in the context of the major MAENAD objectives, e.g. for ISO26262 support or support of various analyses. On the other hand, some updates were initiated by other research projects, for example the results of the TIMMO2USE project on modeling timing-related information were integrated into EAST-ADL. Finally, some fixes and refinements resulted from a general language consolidation review undertaken within the MAENAD project earlier this year. This includes, for example, a change in the inheritance structure of meta-classes such as function types and ports, in order to be in line with the latest AUTOSAR version where this has also been modified (introduction of AtpType, AtpPrototype, etc.).

However, with respect to the core of the language and from the perspective of a modeler applying EAST-ADL, these changes do not introduce fundamental differences or fundamentally new concepts. So the core of the language is kept fairly stable. Extensions with some more detailed changes include those on timing and behavior. All the abovementioned changes will be made available as part of the upcoming EAST-ADL M2.1.11 release.

In addition the UML2 profile for EAST-ADL has been updated to the latest EAST-ADL version M2.1.10 and the latest MARTE version.

Case studies

The selected case studies, preliminarily defined in the first year, have been updated in terms of specification and models.

The activities have been carried out to provide better support for the evaluation of MAENAD capabilities for the design and analysis of complex FEV architectures.

The hardware architecture of the “Propulsion and power distribution subsystem” has been revised. The case study has been enhanced with new design views, specifically the functional analysis architecture.

Hazard analysis and risk assessment have been performed on the above mentioned subsystem to evaluate the ability of MAENAD to support ISO 26262 safety processes and safety concepts, as well as their integration with other aspects of system development.

A “dependability” model with a view of the risk assessment performed has been created, to investigate the tool support for this type of model view.

The “Mode and range management” subsystem has been enhanced to provide better support with regard to project objectives. New model views have been added such as the Behavioral model, the AUTOSAR model in ARText and the timing model.

The same applies for the “Regenerative braking”  subsystem, where all the existing views developed during the first year of the project have been updated, and new model views focused on timing, timing requirements and E2E timing have been created to support the evaluation of the performance analysis and the optimization approach.

Tool Support

MetaEdit+ for EAST-ADL provides a multi-user modeling environment for systems and software development. Various graphical modeling editors and browsers for EAST-ADL are described at www.metacase.com/papers/MetaEditPlus_EAST-ADL_Tooling.pdf. MetaEdit+ enables the use of models for various analysis and testing purposes (e.g. with TLA, UPPAAL, SPIN) and integrates with other development tools (e.g. Simulink, Visual Studio, Eclipse). Contact Mr. Janne Luoma (janne@metacase.com) for details.

SystemWeaver  provides a  multi-user environment for model-based development along with configuration and version control. EAST-ADL 2.1.9 and M2.1.10 are implemented using SystemWeaver, and a collaborative environment has been set up for MAENAD. EAXML exchange has been implemented, so far concentrating on the hardware architecture. More information can be provided by Systemite (www.systemite.se).

The UML tool Papyrus has received updated support for EAST-ADL 2.1.10 through its UML profile and related plugin with toolbars for various EAST-ADL areas. The Papyrus homepage is here: http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/mdt/papyrus, and a version configured for EAST-ADL can be downloaded from MAENAD website: http://www.maenad.eu/public_pw/Tooling/papyrus0.8.2-eastadl2.1.10.zip.  

EATOP was introduced in our previous newsletter as an Eclipse project in preparation similar to ARTOP. More information can be found at the Eclipse Automotive IWG: http://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/eclipse-auto-iwg/wiki/EATOP. An initial code contribution has been made and several activities are ongoing to provide elements to the platform.

October 2011: Below is an update regarding milestone 4 progress.

The MAENAD project has completed milestone 4 and its first year. Below is a short summary of the results. Overall focus has been to identify needs and requirements from a general perspective, and in particular from the ISO26262 functional safety standard and relevant electrical vehicle standards. The EAST-ADL language itself has only been subject to minor adjustments. By keeping it stable in this phase, it was possible to offer EAST-ADL support in several tools and experiment with validator examples.

In addition, we would like to announce that the EAST-ADL association has been formed, see info at the end of the nesletter and at www.east-adl.info.

Language and profile update

The EAST-ADL version currently in use within the project is 2.1.9 and a new version 2.1.10 is expected around end of 2011. This upcoming version will include adjustments to improve support for ISO26262 and several improvements and extensions related to optimization and behaviour description. Each version is supplied with a corresponding implementation as a UML-profile and an XML schema.

Engineering scenarios related to fully electric vehicles

The aim of the MAENAD project is to extend the EAST-ADL methodology for the engineering of Fully Electrical Vehicles, FEVs. An initial activity was therefore the definition of user needs in the engineering processes starting from the concept phase.

The technical issues related to FEVs during their development have been identified, in order to address especially those that are EV specific. Examples are high voltage, insulation, battery charging, integration with conventional vehicle systems, communication with the infrastructure, new propulsion and energy storage technologies.

Standards and regulations play a major role to guide engineers in their job. Therefore standards and regulations from ISO, IEC, SAE, UNECE, FMVSS, NHTSA applicable to EV development have been considered. Those relevant to MAENAD have been identified and deeply examined along with the safety standard ISO26262. Both language/modelling and methodology requirements were identified.

Methodology

In a first step, the existing EAST-ADL methodology, as developed in the ATESST2 project, has been analysed vs. the identified requirements. A base line for extension is identified and in the next quarter a first release of the methodology will be released.

Modeling platform update

In the MAENAD project, tooling consist of three different sets of tools: 1) the modelling workbench which relies on the Papyrus support for EAST-ADL; 2) the analysis workbench which is a set of plugins, which complement the modelling workbench, providing extra modelling capabilities (e.g. feature/variability), analysis means in connection with external tools (e.g. fault tree analysis with HiP-HOPS), or extra design steps (e.g. generation of an AUTOSAR architecture based on an EAST-ADL model); 3) a set of commercial tool adaptations to support EAST-ADL modelling (e.g. adaptation of SystemWeaver from Systemite, MetaEdit+ from MetaCase).

During the first year of the MAENAD project, an update of the inherited ATESST2 Papyrus-based modeling environment was performed. It now relies on the up-to-date Papyrus MDT UML modeler. The EAST-ADL profile support was updated for this platform to provide specific element-creation palette and model creation wizard, that enables to start off a project with a well-structured EAST-ADL model.  An archived bundle with a complete and well-configured installation is available on request from the MAENAD project. This will be made publically available and will be advertised from the MAENAD website in the coming months.

A new challenge in the MAENAD project is the integration of the tool adaptations mentioned above. To this aim, an XML format was defined and chosen as a neutral exchange basis for EAST-ADL models: it is referred to as EAXML. Tooling to enable the edition of such EAXML files and their import/export from/to the main modelling workbench is under development. This was assessed as a priority for the tooling effort and results are expected in the course of the second year of the MAENAD project.

The ATESST2 plugins are to be migrated to Papyrus MDT. Currently the HiP-HOPS analysis plugin has been migrated, and others will be updated, including Simulink import and export. New plugins under development are importing of Functional Mockup Units and exchange with ModelicaML. New analysis plugins are under development, including timing analysis, architecture optimization and configuration, AUTOSAR Gateway and more.

Enhancement of Language Support for Analysis, V&V

The reasoning and analysis of dependability & performance involve many aspects in a system’s lifecycle.  During the first year of the MAENAD project, a proposal to extend EAST-ADL for allowing native behavior definitions has been developed.  The aim is to support a more precise/formal declaration of behavioral constraints in EAST-ADL. A precise specification of such constraints is fundamental for many overall design decisions, including requirements definitions and refinements, feature and function structuring, the synthesis of analytical models and test cases, and safety engineering, etc.  It is seldom the case that a single analysis tool would cover all these. Even if the actual behaviors of system functions can be captured in external tools (e.g. Simulink), there is still a need of explicitly annotating related bounds (e.g., component contracts in regard to invariants of data, visible mode response, etc.) and permitting the traceability such as for change management and consistency control.

The proposed language extension consists of three categories of behavior constraints:

·         Attribute Quantification Constraint – relating to the declarations of value attributes and the related acausal quantifications (e.g., U=I*R). 

·         Temporal Constraint – relating to the declarations of behavior constraints where the history of behaviors on a timeline is taken into consideration.

·         Computation Constraint – relating to the declarations of cause-effect dependencies of data in terms of logical transformations (for data assignments) and logical paths.

Each of these behavior constraints can be associated to time conditions given in terms of logical time, of which the exact semantics can be given by the existing EAST-ADL support for execution events (e.g. the triggering, and port data sending & receiving events of a function).

The meta-model integration is done in a modular way such that no existing EAST-ADL constructs are modified by the extension.

While currently focusing on nominal behaviors, this work will in a near future cover error behaviors and investigate the possible support of EAST-ADL for formal safety analysis and fault injection. For example, this would allow precise definitions of faulty conditions and their transitions from & to nominal states in association with certain probabilistic attributes. 

EAST-ADL Association

As you Know, the EAST-ADL language is developed by different projects and stakeholders over time. To synchronize further refinement of the language and provide an entry point for EAST-ADL information, an organization has been discussed for some time. September 1st, the EAST-ADL association was formed.

The EAST-ADL Association is a non-profit, non-governmental organization with the aim of assisting and promoting the development and application of the EAST-ADL.

The EAST-ADL Association will stipulate the content of new versions of the EAST-ADL language. This will be done through collaboration between the members of the association and within projects and organizations working with EAST-ADL.

Membership in the EAST-ADL Association is open to individuals and organizations who agree to support the purpose of the association. The EAST-ADL Association has no fees or funds, and each member carry any costs for contributing.

The initial set of members are companies and individuals from OEMs, suppliers, tool vendors and research organizations developing EAST-ADL. If you are interested to join the association, please contact info@east-adl.info

May 2011: Below is an update regarding milestone 3 progress on

the different demonstrators that are planned, the EAST-ADL methodology and possible new language concepts.

Demonstrators

EV Demo

The EV Demo is a part of the EV Demo Car, which is currently under development at Continental. The EV Demo Car shall demonstrate the car’s entire potential set of features and functions. Furthermore, innovative components and functions for an EV is a focus point to be demonstrated by means of this Demo Car.

The architecture and interfaces of the EV Demo Car system are defined in such a way that the components support best energy efficiency of the vehicle as well as to provide the required information to the driver. Thus the EV Demo Car shall represent a particularly well-adapted platform to propose enhanced ergonomic-driven cockpit solutions facing the issues of always increasing complexity. This depends on the kind of function and on the safety relevance of the function/component.

The new concept of electric vehicle requires adapted system architecture and new system components to match the desired functionality. Not only the combustion engine is changed to electric propulsion but as well new additional functions have to be considered. The EV will be successful in the market if it is easy, simple, fun to drive and affordable in comparison to conventional combustion engines driven vehicles.

For the EV Demo as part of MAENAD one of the newly developed components for the EV Demo Car will be a physical part of the demonstrator – the High Voltage Junction box.  The aim of the EV Demo is to show the power distribution and interlock concept as well as the Driving mode selection.

ID4EV demonstrator

Within WP5 of the ID4EV project – intelligent networking – the goal is to identify and control the driving modes of an electric vehicle. This includes the already existing system modes of a vehicle, as well as to be defined driving profiles for an electric vehicle and a power and energy management. This includes the ability to act in critical rage situations by finding charging spots along the road, or switching off consumer systems or putting them in a more energy efficient mode. A HMI concept to support these concepts also is in the scope of the WP5. A special focus on the ID4EV models is on dynamic models as the interaction with the driver, the mode management and other algorithms contributing to the energy mode management as the range calculation and navigation services.

Within the MAENAD project, the modeling efforts of ID4EV are supported and extended by applying and adding EAST-ADL techniques in order support process steps not covered in the ID4EV project (Feature Modelling), enable analysis techniques specific to the EAST-ADL language (MARTE, HIP-HOPS) and adapt and align with simulation technologies as introduced by SysML and Modelica.

Regenerative braking

This case study, built up from previous studies of Brake-by-Wire (BBW) system in ATESST, ATESST2 and TIMMO projects and a physical implementation at VTEC, aims to provide a basis for the validation and demonstration of all EAST-ADL features relevant to MAENAD. Emphasis will be placed on the language enhancement through MAENAD for quality analysis, verification and validation along with architecture modeling and related tool support in the context of a Full Electric Vehicle (FEV). In particular, the following features will be explicitly evaluated: 

I.      modeling and analysis of behaviors for requirements, architectural design, timing and dependability analysis;

II.      modeling for supporting ISO 2262 through representing safety goals, functional and technical safety concept and their formalization;

III.      automated test-case generation, test system modeling, and support for fault injection;

IV.      integration of compositional variability models and design-space specification;

V.      modeling and analysis of physical dynamics with multiple levels of abstraction;

VI.      modeling and analysis of selected part of the electrical architecture.

New language concepts in discussion

An important part of the work in MAENAD will be to assess the impact of the project objectives (e.g. comprehensive support for ISO26262) on the concepts and elements of the EAST-ADL language. It is expected that some objectives will require additional modeling means in the language or an improvement and/or extension of existing concepts. In any case, the first step has to be an assessment of the effectiveness and feasibility of the current EAST-ADL concepts (as of version 2.1) with respect to the MAEAND project objectives. Of course, this will be an iterative process. The relevant project objectives in this context are: model-based support for (a) ISO26262, for (b) dependability and performance analysis, and for (c) multi-objective optimization, including product-line aware optimization across product variants. The first version of these language concept improvements is expected end of November 2011 and another iteration is scheduled for end of August 2012. It should be noted here that we plan to keep the core of EAST-ADL as stable as possible, so almost all of the aforementioned language changes are expected to only affect the extension packages of EAST-ADL.

Methodology

The EAST-ADL methodology has been defined during the ATESST2 project, to give guidance on the use of the language for the construction, validation and reuse of automotive systems.

The aim of MAENAD is to extend this methodology for FEV engineering, and for the application of concepts for functional safety, as defined in the ISO26262. Although functional safety is covered already by the current version of the methodology, there are still open issues that need to be addressed in MAENAD, especially in the context of the ISO26262, and the combination with electric vehicles. Furthermore, new approaches and language extensions, which will be developed in MAENAD, will be addressed by the new methodology, too.

The following aspects will be addressed by the extended methodology:

• Specific standards related to FEV
• Application of safety concepts in FEV as defined in the ISO26262, supported by EAST-ADL
• Novel techniques for automated fault tree analysis and FMEA
• Application of automated techniques for ASIL decomposition
• Application of new concepts for V&V, e.g. using behavioral simulation, fault simulation and fault injection
• Introduction of new concepts for overall safety assessment, providing sufficient evidence of application of ISO26262 concerning the design process and the relevant work products, including requirements capturing and modeling, completeness of safety analysis, of the safety case, and of the V&V

Like in the ATESST2 project, the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) Composer is chosen as tool support for the specification of the methodology. The resulting model of the EAST-ADL methodology can be exported an XML export library, and as hypertext documentation which is accessible by common web browsers.

February 2011: Below is an update regarding project requirements and the language definition effort.

Requirements and Needs

Work package 2 collects and tracks the needs and requirements for EAST-ADL based modeling and analysis of electric vehicles. Furthermore, the WP has identified a set of typical scenarios, concepts and tool experiments expected to be encountered in FEV design.

The needs are derived from the 4 main project objectives, which were defined already in the project proposal:

(O1) Develop capabilities for modeling and analysis support, following ISO 26262

Modeling and analysis support, following processes in ISO 26262 and including assisted allocation of safety requirements and ASILs during the refinement of a FEV design in EAST-ADL.

(O2) Develop capabilities for prediction of dependability & performance

Model-based dependability analysis of EAST-ADL2 models of FEV aspects, including correct temporal analysis. Model-based prediction of behavior & performance evaluation of EAST-ADL2 models of FEV.

(O3) Develop capabilities for design optimization

Multi-objective optimization of EAST-ADL2 models of FEV in respect of dependability, performance and cost via automatic model transformations applied by genetic algorithms or via resolution of available design variability.

(O4) Verify, validate and explain the above capabilities in practical FEV design

Capturing developer needs, usage scenarios, and defining tutorials, examples and case studies, in order to ensure evaluation and as a basis for industrial adoption.

Each requirement defined in WP2 is a refinement of one or more of the above objectives, and will be addressed by the corresponding responsible technical work package.

In order to show how the EAST-ADL can benefit the design of FEV, and to identify the need for further improvements, a set of typical engineering scenarios has been defined. These scenarios include especially the application of FEV specific standards beyond the ISO 26262, and specific operational situations such as charging or recuperative braking.

Engineering scenarios also include more general issues not particularly related to FEV design. These are e.g. related to the exchange of models between different tools, the transformation of EAST-ADL models to AUTOSAR, or to testing.

Similar to the requirements described above, the engineering scenarios are derived from the project objectives, and a set of requirements is assigned to each scenario.

EAST-ADL Language Refinement

One of the main result of the project will be a proposed new version of EAST-ADL. At this point, we have organized the infrastructure for language documentation and selected the baseline for further refinement. We call this version EAST-ADL M2.1.9 as it is based on EAST-ADL 2.1, but contains minor adjustments from MAENAD. For administrative purposes, the version number is already a 9, but it will later only increase one step at a time. During the course of the project, new MAENAD-versions of EAST-ADL will be issued. The MAENAD versions will be proposed as main EAST-ADL versions and possibly merged with other proposals for EAST-ADL updates.