A Domain Specific Language in Dependability Analysis

Domain specific languages gain increasing popularity as they substantially leverage software development by bridging the gap between technical and business area. After a domain framework is produced, experts gain an effective vehicle for assessing quality and performance of a system in the business-specific context. We consider the domain to be dependability of multi-agent system (MAS), for which a key requirement is an efficient verification of a topology model of a power system. As a result, we come up with a reliability evaluation solution offering a significant rise in the level of abstraction towards MAS utilized for purposes of a power system topology verification. By means of the mentioned solution safety engineers are enabled to perform analysis while the design is still incomplete. A new DSL is developed in XText in order to specify a structure of the system together with dependability extensions, which are further translated into dynamic fault trees using model to model transformations. The Eclipse Ecore becomes a common denominator, in which both metamodelspsila abstract syntax trees are defined. Finally, an expert is offered with two ways of defining a model: through abstract and textual concrete syntax, both of which are checked for consistency using object constraint language.