Using dedicated Review Diagrams to detect Defective Functional Interplay in Function-Centered Engineering

Today’s embedded systems are highly integrated in their context. Their functional behavior does not only result from individual functions but also arises in the interplay between these functions. Automotive and avionics systems consist of control circuits to determine values in the context and to influence context properties. Thereby, indirect interplay between functions emerges from overlapping control circuits, which influence the same context measurement. Often the resulting interplay must be considered as unintended. It is of importance to detect such unintended functional interplay and to determine whether it is desired but unspecified interplay or defective interplay. To foster detecting defective functional interplay this paper suggests the explicit model-based documentation of context measurements in the functional design. Based on this information, we propose the automated generation of dedicated review diagrams to aid in deciding whether unspecified functional interplay is defective.