SFB 501 - Project D1: Application System Buildings

AG VLSI Design and Architecture

SFB 501 - Project D1:
Application System "Buildings"

As usual: Page under construction!

Description

The project D1 has two major goals:

it provides the infrastructure for building automation experiments for all other projects of SFB 501
research towards an efficient domain-specific requirements engineering method for large reactive systems.

Building automation systems can be executed and tested in real or simulated building environments. Solutions for both cases and combinations of the two are provided. As "living laboratory" staff offices, laboratories, and hallways of the research group are equipped with sensors, actuators, processors, and communication networks for heat, ventilation, light, security, and safety experiments. In parallel, the generation of building and person simulators is pursued. Object orientation and design patterns are employed to automate the generation process. Simulators are structured as close to the structure of the tested building automation systems to support reuse, transparency, and changeability.

System testing, especially of embedded reactive systems, should be supported during all phases of the developed process. Functional as well as non-functional requirements have to be tested. Besides the building environment a prototyping environment and a development method are necessary to make intermediate models executable. The prototyping environment is another part of the provided infrastructure.

During requirements engineering the initial customer-provided informal requirements have to be transformed into consistent, complete and validated system requirements for the system design phase. Domain expert knowledge has to be incorporated to provide an initial solution for executable requirements. A project goal is the development of an analysis method and process that makes this development phase efficient enough to be applicable in real applications. The means are domain-specific knowledge and artifact repositories, support of reuse, and specific model architectures, using off-the-shelf-tool supported modeling techniques.