Component and Connector Views in Practice: An Experience Report

Component and Connector (C&C) view specifications, with corresponding verification and synthesis techniques, have been recently suggested as a means for formal yet intuitive structural specification of C&C models. In this paper we report on our recent experience in applying C&C views in industrial practice, where we aimed to answer questions such as: could C&C views be practically used in industry, what are challenges of systems engineers that the use of C&C views could address, and what are some of the technical obstacles in bringing C&C views to the hands of systems engineers. We describe our experience in detail and discuss a list of lessons we have learned, including, e.g., a missing abstraction concept in C&C models and C&C views that we have identified and added to the views language and tool, that engineers can create graphical C&C views quite easily, and how verification algorithms scale on real-size industry models. Furthermore, we report on the non-negligible technical effort needed to translate Simulink block diagrams to C&C models. We make all materials mentioned and used in our experience electronically available for inspection and further research.