Including semantic information in models helps to expose modeling errors early in the design process, engage a designer in
a deeper understanding of the model, and standardize concepts and terminology across a development team. It is impractical,
however, for model builders to manually annotate every modeling element with semantic properties. This paper demonstrates
a correct, scalable and automated method to infer semantic properties using lattice-based ontologies, given relatively few
manual annotations. Semantic concepts and their relationships are formalized as a lattice, and relationships within and between
components are expressed as a set of constraints and acceptance criteria relative to the lattice. Our inference engine automatically
infers properties wherever they are not explicitly specified. Our implementation leverages the infrastructure in the Ptolemy
II type system to get efficient and scalable inference and consistency checking. We demonstrate the approach on a non-trivial
Ptolemy II model of an adaptive cruise control system.
This work was supported in part by the Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems (CHESS) at UC Berkeley, which receives
support from the National Science Foundation (NSF awards #0720882 (CSR-EHS: PRET) and #0720841 (CSR-CPS)), the U. S. Army
Research Office (ARO #W911NF-07-2-0019), the U. S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (MURI #FA9550-06-0312), the Air
Force Research Lab (AFRL), the State of California Micro Program, and the following companies: Agilent, Bosch, Lockheed-Martin,
National Instruments, Thales, and Toyota.