A Software Hub for High Assurance Model-Driven Development and Analysis

Recent years have seen an increase in the use of model-based languages and associated tools for the development of embedded and distributed systems. The same period has also seen the development of a number of analysis tools for embedded systems. Each of these tools has its own modeling language, often with complicated and subtle semantics. In addition many are proprietary. As a consequence, there are only a handful of vendors that provide tools capable of importing and analyzing models in those languages. This situation gives rise to technical challenges: how to integrate these tools, and how to generate high-quality code from models to reduce hand-transformation. From a commercial perspective the challenge is to transform the market from proprietary tool chains with little interoperability to an open standard architecture. The Kestrel Technology SW Metro project will address both the technical and the commercial challenges. The former will be handled by an architecture and a language that supports semantic integration of models. For the commercial side we will select a suitable organization to make these formal standards. Our goal is to encourage import/export capability by the various vendors for tool integration, analysis, and code generation.