A Component-Based Debugging Approach for Detecting Structural Inconsistencies in Declarative Equation Based Models

Object-oriented modeling with declarative equation based languages oftenunconsciously leads to structural inconsistencies. Component-baseddebugging is a new structural analysis approach that addresses thisproblem by analyzing the structure of each component in a model toseparately locate faulty components. The analysis procedure isperformed recursively based on the depth-first rule. It first generatesfictitious equations for a component to establish a debuggingenvironment, and then detects structural defects by using graphtheoretical approaches to analyzing the structure of the system ofequations resulting from the component. The proposed method canautomatically locate components that cause the structuralinconsistencies, and show the user detailed error messages. Thisinformation can be a great help in finding and localizing structuralinconsistencies, and in some cases pinpoints them immediately.