An Application of SMC to continuous validation of heterogeneous systems

Abstract

This paper considers the rigorous design of Systems of Systems (SoS), i.e. systems composed of a set ofheterogeneous components whose number evolves with time. Such components cooperate to accomplishfunctions that they could not achieve in isolation. Examples of SoS include smart cities or airport management system. The dynamical evolution of SoS behavior and architecture makes it impossible to design an appropriate solution beforehand. Consequently, existing approaches build on an iterative process that takes SoS evolution into account. A key challenge in this process is the ability to reason about and analyze agiven view of the SoS (on a fixed number of SoS constituents) with respect to a set of goals, and use theresults to eventually predict the evolution of the SoS. To address this challenge, we rely on a scalable formalverification technique known as Statistical Model Checking (SMC). SMC quantifies how close the currentview is from achieving a given mission. We integrate SMC with existing industrial practice, by addressingboth methodological and technological issues. Our contribution is: (1) a methodology for validation of SoSformal requirements; (2) a formal specification language able to express complex SoS requirements; (3) the adoption of current industry standards for simulation and heterogeneous systems integration ; (4) a robust SMC tool-chain integrated with system design tools used in practice. We illustrate the application of our SMC tool-chain and the obtained results on a case study.

Keywords

• systems of systems
• statistical model checking
• fmi
• tool-chain
• simulation.