Analytic Dependency Loops in Architectural Models of Cyber-Physical Systems

Rigorous engineering of safety-critical Cyber- Physical Systems (CPS) requires integration of heterogeneous modeling methods from different disciplines. It is often necessary to view this integration from the perspective of analyses – algorithms that read and change models. Although analytic integration supports formal contract-based verification of model evolution, it suffers from the limitation of analytic dependency loops. Dependency loops between analyses cannot be resolved based on the existing contract-based verification. This paper makes a step towards using rich architectural description to resolve circular analytic dependencies. We characterize the dependency loop problem and discuss three algorithmic approaches to resolving such loops: analysis iteration, constraint solving, and genetic search. These approaches take advantage of information in multi-view architectures to resolve analytic dependency loops