A Concept for Set‐based Design of Verification Strategies

Xu, Peng; Salado, Alejandro

doi:10.1002/j.2334-5837.2019.00608.x

Cited by 15 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…To the best of our knowledge, only recent works by Salado et. al Xu and Salado 2019;) have explicitly modeled a firm's belief over the possible states of its design. In this paper, we continue this line of work by using belief distributions to model a firm's belief in the state of its design.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a result, verification activities consume a significant amount of resources during systems' lifecycle throughout the industry (Tahera et al 2017). Hence, the importance of discovering the scientific foundations of verification activities in systems engineering has been recognized by multiple authors, and research on developing robust decision-making frameworks for verification activities is an active research area (Engel and Barad 2003;Shabi and Reich 2012;Salado and Kannan 2019;Xu and Salado 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Coordination of verification activities with incentives: a two-firm model

2020

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In systems engineering, verification activities evaluate the extent to which a system under development satisfies its requirements. In large systems engineering projects, multiple firms are involved in the system development, and hence verification activities must be coordinated. Self-interest impedes the implementation of verification strategies that are beneficial for all firms while encouraging each firm to choose a verification strategy beneficial to itself. Incentives for verification activities can motivate a single firm to adopt verification strategies beneficial to all firms in the project, but these incentives must be offered judiciously to minimize unnecessary expenditures and prevent the abuse of goodwill. In this paper, we use game theory to model a contractor-subcontractor scenario, in which the subcontractor provides a component to the contractor, who further integrates it into their system. Our model uses belief distributions to capture each firm’s epistemic uncertainty in their component’s state prior to verification, and we use multiscale decision theory to model interdependencies between the contractor and subcontractor’s design. We propose an incentive mechanism that aligns the verification strategies of the two firms and using our game-theoretic model, we identify those scenarios where the contractor benefits from incentivizing the subcontractor’s verification activities.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coordination of verification activities with incentives: a two-firm model

2020

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“…To address these limitations, we derive optimal verification strategies using a belief‐based approach to model the system development process. To the best of our knowledge, only the recent works by Salado et al 3,39–41 have adopted the approach of capturing the epistemic uncertainty in the design process by using belief distributions to model verification strategies. In their work, verification strategies are derived based on the organization's changing belief in the system design meeting the system requirements.…”

Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

An evaluation of the optimality of frequent verification for vertically integrated systems

Kulkarni

Salado

et al. 2020

Systems Engineering

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Verification activities, such as inspection, testing, analysis, and demonstration, improve one's confidence in the system meeting the system requirements during the development process. Frequent verification is often advocated as a strategy that minimizes costs of rework over the entire design process, where frequent verification involves verifying after any change in the design. However, this strategy is yet to be validated. In this paper, we develop a belief‐based model of verification in systems design to determine the conditions under which frequent verification is an optimal strategy for a vertically integrated organization. Our model uses belief distributions to capture the organization's dynamic confidence in the system design meeting a requirement of interest during the development process. It also captures the organization's dynamic confidence in the correctness of its development activities (or design process) as a function of past verification activities and current system maturity. The analysis of our model shows that frequent verification is a cost‐minimizing strategy for any level of belief in satisfying the requirement only when the organization has high confidence in the correctness of its design activities and the expected cost to rework a faulty design is greater than the costs to set up the verification activities throughout the development process. Otherwise, strategies with infrequent verification are superior. Our work contributes to the growing body of literature on the theoretical foundations of systems engineering and engineering design and seeks to provide practitioners with a means to determine optimal verification strategies.

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“…Despite the strong coupling between VAs and CAs, and the criticality of CAs, existing research focuses on the modeling and selection of just one type of activity, significantly simplifying or even ignoring the other activity. For example, CAs are treated as direct properties of VAs (not as independent activities) in research that aims to develop system verification models or to design methods to generate verification strategies 1,[12][13][14][15][16] . Similarly, VAs are ignored in work that aims to better understand CA models or analysis methods 10,17 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling correction activities in the context of verification strategies

Salado

2021

Systems Engineering

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Correction activities (CAs), which can take the form of redesign, rework, or repair, are essential to system development. Whereas verification activities (VAs) provide information about the state of the system, CAs modify the state of the system to facilitate its correct operation. However, existing approaches to modeling and optimizing verification strategies take a simplistic approach to CAs. Specifically, CAs are modeled as an expected cost to achieve a desired confidence level after a VA has failed and are inherent to such VAs. In this paper, we present a modeling paradigm based on Bayesian networks (BNs) that captures the effects of different types of CAs. This modeling paradigm allows for the integration of verification and correction decisions (CDs) under a common framework. The modeling paradigm is illustrated in the notional case of a communication system.

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A Concept for Set‐based Design of Verification Strategies

Cited by 15 publications

References 11 publications

Coordination of verification activities with incentives: a two-firm model

Coordination of verification activities with incentives: a two-firm model

An evaluation of the optimality of frequent verification for vertically integrated systems

Modeling correction activities in the context of verification strategies

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