  In Model-Based Design of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), it is often desirable
to develop several models of varying fidelity. Models of different fidelity
levels can enable mathematical analysis of the model, control synthesis, faster
simulation etc. Furthermore, when (automatically or manually) transitioning
from a model to its implementation on an actual computational platform, then
again two different versions of the same system are being developed. In all
previous cases, it is necessary to define a rigorous notion of conformance
between different models and between models and their implementations. This
paper argues that conformance should be a measure of distance between systems.
Albeit a range of theoretical distance notions exists, a way to compute such
distances for industrial size systems and models has not been proposed yet.
This paper addresses exactly this problem. A universal notion of conformance as
closeness between systems is rigorously defined, and evidence is presented that
this implies a number of other application-dependent conformance notions. An
algorithm for detecting that two systems are not conformant is then proposed,
which uses existing proven tools. A method is also proposed to measure the
degree of conformance between two systems. The results are demonstrated on a
range of models.
