Formal Methods for the Inspection of Vehicle Configuration Rules

Preprint, 2014

Vehicle configuration is the activity to create a vehicle specification from a set of predefined components that can only be combined in certain ways. These certain ways are defined by logic expressions called vehicle configuration rules. The vehicle configuration rules can be visualized, and then manually inspected by a product developer. The inspection of vehicle configuration rules aims at preventing errors, and is used when collaborating on the development of new vehicle configurations. This paper proposes formal methods supporting the inspection of vehicle configuration rules, by addressing the 1) reformulation of vehicle configuration rules, 2) testing of feature variant combinations, and 3) counting of item quantities from an item set. The formal methods were tested on industrial vehicle configuration rules for computational performance. The results show that the time for execution is within seconds. The future work is to implement the formal methods with a demonstrator that could be tested by product developers.