Executing reconfigurations in hierarchical component architectures

Mechatronic systems reconfigure the structure of their software architecture, e.g., to avoid hazardous situations or to optimize operational conditions like minimizing their energy consumption. As software architectures are typically build on components, reconfiguration actions need to respect the component structure. This structure should be hierarchical to enable encapsulated components. While many reconfiguration approaches for embedded real-time systems allow the use of hierarchically embedded components, i.e., horizontal composition, none of them offers a modeling and verification solution to take hierarchical composition, i.e., encapsulation, into account. In this paper, we present an extension to our existing modeling language, muml, to enable safe hierarchical reconfigurations. The two main extensions are (a) an adapted variant of the two-phase commit protocol to initiate reconfigurations which maintain component encapsulation and (b) a timed model checking verification approach for instances of our model. We illustrate our approach on a case study in the area of smart railway systems by showing two different use cases of our approach and the verification of their safety properties.