Rule checking within the model-based development of safety-critical systems and embedded automotive software

Safety and reliability cannot be tested into technical software systems on embedded control units after their development. Preventive actions have to be taken in respect of safety and reliability. An automatic and tool supported check of custom rules, industry standards and enterprise wide guidelines can support the quality assurance process. In the domain of automotive software engineering there is a lack of automatic checking for standard conformance. Especially, a formal and tool independent notation of rules to follow is missing. In this paper, the model-based development of automotive vehicle functions with the tools MATLAB, Simulink and Stateflow is taken as an example to show how textual rules describing standards to be met can be transformed into a formal notation using the open standards MOF and OCL. Thereafter these rules can be checked automatically. The feasibility of this approach is shown by a software demonstrator.