On Teaching Applied Formal Methods in Aerospace Engineering

Abstract

As formal methods come into broad industrial use for verification of safety-critical hardware, software, and cyber-physical systems, there is an increasing need to teach practical skills in applying formal methods at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In the aerospace industry, flight certification requirements like the FAA's DO-178B, DO-178C, DO-333, and DO-254, along with a series of high-profile accidents, have helped turn knowledge of formal methods into a desirable job skill for a wide range of engineering positions. We approach the question of verification from a safety-case perspective: the primary teaching goal is to impart students with the ability to look at a verification question and identify what formal methods are applicable, which tools are available, what the outputs from those tools will say about the system, and what they will not, e.g., what parts of the safety case need to be provided by other means. We overview the lectures, exercises, exams, and student projects in a mixed-level (undergraduate/graduate) Applied Formal Methods course 1 taught in an Aerospace Engineering department. We highlight the approach, tools, and techniques aimed at imparting a good sense of both the state of the art and the state of the practice of formal methods in an effort to effectively prepare students headed for jobs in an increasingly formal world.

Teaching Interactive Proofs to Mathematicians

“…In addition to our course on Computational Logic for CS students previously mentioned, other approaches to teach formal methods to different audiences have been proposed. Restricting the discussion to a few and recently reported approaches that are focused on fulfilling quickly the specific interests of the attendants, we can mention the course on Deductive Verification in Why3 by Sandrine Blazy at the Université Rennes 1, to train undergraduate students to develop their own correctness proofs of non-trivial sorting and searching algorithms [7]; the course taught at the École Nationale Supérioure d'Informatique pour L'Industrie et L'Entrepise, as part of the Software Engineering curriculum, by Catherine Dubois et al, in which students develop skills on formal methods [11]; and, the course by Kristin Yvonne Rozier prepared for the Aerospace Engineering departments at Iowa State University and the University of Cincinnati, to train attendants to look at a verification question and identify what formal methods and tools are applicable to check safety-critical systems [27]. It is interesting to stress Catherine Dubois et al's position (in [11]) ratifying the importance of the effectiveness of the teaching approach to meet the specific demands of the target audience (in our case Mathematicians, and their case, CS/Engineers):…”