Supporting Semi-Automatic Co-Evolution of Architecture and Fault Tree Models

In the whole life-cycle of systems in safety-critical domains, system models must consistently co-evolve with quality evaluation models like fault trees. However, performing these co-evolution steps is a cumbersome and often manual task. To understand this problem in detail, we have analyzed the evolution and mined common changes of architecture and fault tree models for a set of evolution scenarios of a part of a factory automation system called pick&place unit. Based on the results, we could derive a set of co-evolution rules which fully cover the evolution scenarios of the case study and which offer the potential to semi-automate the co-evolution process. In particular, we evaluated these rules by a comparison to typical visual editor operations. Our results show a signicant reduction of the amount of required user interactions in order to realize the co-evolution.