Real-Time Coordination Patterns for Advanced Mechatronic Systems

Paper in proceeding, 2012

Innovation in today's mechanical systems is often only possible due to the embedded software. Particularly, the software enables the connection of previously isolated systems resulting in, so-called, advanced mechatronic systems. Mechatronic systems are often employed in a safety-critical context. Thus, hazards that are caused by faults in the software have to be prevented. Preferably, this is achieved by already avoiding these faults during development. One major source of faults is the complex coordination between the connected mechatronic systems. In this paper, we present Real-Time Coordination Patterns for advanced mechatronic systems. These patterns formalize proven communication protocols for the coordination between mechatronic systems as reusable entities. Furthermore, the proposed pattern formalism supports the scalable formal verification for fault avoidance by utilizing the protocols that are based on patterns to decompose the system. We illustrate the patterns with examples from different case studies.