A Contract-Based Approach to Support Goal-Driven Analysis

In the design of real-time systems, models are usual artifacts to capture and represent the various features of the system. They are later analyzed to check for their correctness. A key issue is to handle models and analyses in a systematic, consistent and efficient way. This paper presents an approach for the systematic and correct execution of analyses on real-time system models along with a proof-of-concept. The contribution aims at 1) directing the analyses targeting goals and 2) using contracts to reason about models, analyses and goals. An example of goal is to enrich a model with missing information or to obtain precise data to conclude about the system quality. In our approach, contracts are used to formally depict both the properties required and provided by the analyses, but also models and goals. Through the concept of contracts, we identify all the feasible paths to execute the analyses in order to reach a goal.