Compatibility Analysis of System Behavior Described by Message Sequence Charts

Abstract

Dynamic behavior of automotive electronic control units (ECUs) can be specified by different models as ASCET, Matlab Simulink or Message Sequence Charts (MSCs). MSCs are often used by automotive OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer) for specifying dynamic behavior of ECUs as black box models. In this paper we present a method which allows a tool based compatibility check of MSCs independently from the structure. Compatibility means, that parts of the behavior of two MSCs are equivalent. Therefore, the MSCs are transformed to nondeterministic automata with -transition which then be transformed to deterministic automata. These are the inputs for a heuristical backward compatibility checking algorithm. Furthermore, we present some representative results of runtime evaluation for our approach, which is used for backward compatibility checking of ECUs by now.