Increasing dependability in safety critical CPSs using reflective statecharts

Abstract

Dependability is crucial in Safety Critical Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). In spite of the research carried out in recent years, implementation and certification of such systems remain costly and time consuming. In this paper, a framework for Statecharts based SW component development is presented. This framework called CRESC (C++ REflective StateCharts), in addition to assisting in transforming a Statechart model to code, uses reflection to make the model available at Run Time. Thus, the SW components can be monitored at Run Time in terms of model elements. Our framework helps the developer separate monitoring from functionality. Any monitoring strategy needed to increase dependability can be added independently from the functional part. The framework was implemented in C++ because this programming language, together with the Statechart formalism constitute widely used choices for the Safety Critical CPS domain.