State Linked Interface Compliance Engine for Data (SLICED)

Despite gains in component cohesion due to FACEs data-modeling standard and approach, integration of UoPs still presents a significant challenge for system integrators. The UoP data models required by FACE are necessary but not sufficient; FACE does not currently provide mechanisms to describe behavioral aspects of communication such as sampling rates, messaging patterns, latency requirements, and mode changes. These missing behavioral details lead to errors currently detectable only through manual, labor intensive review by system integrators.To assist system integrators working with FACE UoPs, we propose the State Linked Interface Compliance Engine for Data (SLICED) tool. SLICED combines existing timing analysis and FACE data standards with descriptions of the state of a UoP. These descriptions, in the form of a state machine, provide formal documentation of the behavior of a UoP. The novelty of SLICED is its use of a composite state machine to represent system level behavior as a structured aggregation of the behavior of individual UoPs which preserves UoP separation properties and is minimally burdensome to both UoP vendors and system integrators. SLICED integrates with existing virtual integration processes and works in parallel with existing tools without duplicating their capabilities.