Model inspections in the engineering of collaborative cyber‐physical systems with instance‐level review diagrams

Abstract

Model inspections are important to ensure high-quality software and to satisfy legal obligations in model-based engineering processes. As model-based specifications are typically documented on type-level, errors concerning the interactions between multiple system instances can go unnoticed. For collaborative cyber-physical systems (CPS), a plethora of possible instance-level configurations need to be taken into account. Therefore, we propose the definition of instance-level review diagrams that show representative interactions of instance-level configurations that help detect defects in the system specification. To evaluate the approach, we conducted a controlled experiment whose results indicate that instance-level review diagrams have—compared with type-level diagrams—important positive effects on reviewing processes for behavioral specifications of CPS. Specifically, the experiment provides empirical evidence that instance-level review diagrams are significantly more expressive and effective than type-level diagrams.