Scientific publications

Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are complex heterogeneous and distributed computing systems, typically integrating and interconnecting a large number of subsystems and containing a substantial number of hardware and software components. Producers of these distributed Cyber-Physical Systems (dCPS) face serious challenges with respect to designing the next generations of these machines and require proper support in making (early) design decisions to avoid expensive and time consuming oversights.

We present a Python library for trace analysis named PyContract. PyContract is a shallow internal DSL, in contrast to many trace analysis tools that implement external or deep internal DSLs. The library has been used in a project for analysis of logs from NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. We describe our design choices, explain the API via examples, and present an experiment comparing PyContract against other state-of-the-art tools from the research and industrial communities.

Software-intensive systems constantly evolve. To prevent software changes from unintentionally introducing costly system defects, it is important to understand their impact to reduce risk. However, it is in practice nearly impossible to foresee the full impact of software changes when dealing with huge industrial systems with many configurations and usage scenarios.