Software is expected to become the dominant driver for innovation for the next generation of advanced distributed embedded real-time systems (advanced mechatronic systems). Software will build communities of autonomous agents at runtime which exploit local and global networking to enhance and optimize their functionality leading to self-adaptation or self-optimization. However, current development tech- niques are not capable of providing the safety guarantees required for this class of systems. Our approach, MechatronicUML, addresses the outlined challenge by proposing a coherent and integrated model-driven develop- ment approach which supports the modeling and verification of safety guarantees for systems with reconfiguration of software components at runtime. Modeling is based on a syntactically and semantically rigor- ously defined and partially refined subset of UML. Verification is based on a special type of decomposition and compositional model checking to make it scalable.