An Effective Verification and Validation Strategy for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems

Abstract

This paper presents the best practices to carry out the verification and validation (V&V) for a safetycritical embedded system, part of a larger system-of-systems. The paper talks about the effectiveness of this strategy from performance and time schedule requirement of a project. The best practices employed for the V &Vis a modification of the conventional V&V approach. The proposed approach is iterative which introduces new testing methodologies apart from the conventional testing methodologies, an effective way of implementing the phases of the V&V and also analyzing the V&V results. The new testing methodologies include the random and non-real time testing apart from the static and dynamic tests. The process phases are logically carried out in parallel and credit of the results of the different phases are taken to ensure that the embedded system that goes for the field testing is bug free. The paper also demonstrates the iterative qualities of the process where the iterations successively find faults in the embedded system and executing the process within a stipulated time frame, thus maintaining the required reliability of the system. This approach is implemented in the most critical applications-aerospace application where safety of the system cannot be compromised. The approach used a fixed number of iterations which is set to4in this application, with each iteration adding to the reliability and safety of the embedded system. Data collected and results observed are compared with a conventional approach for the same application and it is demonstrated that the strategy proposed reduces the time taken by 50% as compared to a conventional process that attains the same reliability as required in the stipulated time.

Artificial intelligence in safety-critical systems: a systematic review

“…Conventional V&V approaches for safety-critical systems are testing and model checking (Kim and Kim, 2012). Testing is to use test cases to test the embedded system until it is assumed that all failures have been detected and all tests generated have been passed (Nanda and Jayanthi, 2013). Model checking is more through than testing, using an exhaustive search of the system state space to trace logical errors in the specifications (Hsiung et al, 2007).…”