Tool Support for Validation of Formal System Models: Interactive Visualization and Requirements Traceability

Abstract

Development processes in various engineering disciplines are incorporating formal models to ensure safety properties of critical systems. The use of these formal models requires to reason about their adequacy, i.e., to validate that a model mirrors the structure of the system sufficiently that properties established for the model indeed carry over to the real system. Model validation itself is non-formal, as adequacy is not a formal (i.e., mathematical) property. Instead it must be carried out by the modeler to justify the modeling to the certification agency or other stakeholders. In this paper we argue that model validation can be seen as a special form of requirements engineering, and that interactive visualization and concepts from requirements traceability can help to advance tool support for formal modeling by lowering the cognitive burden needed for validation. We present the VisualisierbaR tool, which supports the formal modeling of railway operations and describe how it uses interactive visualization and requirements traceability concepts to validate a formal model.

Proving Correctness of Parallel Implementations of Transition System Specifications

“…In these projects, ABS has been extended and successfully applied to the formal modelling and analysis of software product families [17] and software services deployed on the Cloud [31]. The ABS tool suite [20,6,35,2,32,4,21,34] has been further applied to case studies, targeting cloud-based frameworks [53,40,30,39,3], railway operations [33] and computational biology. 7 The parallel execution of active objects (see [18] for a survey of active object languages) is a direct consequence of decoupling method execution from method invocation by means of asynchronous method invocations.…”

Systematic Literature Review of System Models for Technical System Development

“…SysML (can be integrated with Matlab)trade-off and analytics using FEA, Single source of truth Kunnen et al[97] continuous data model with usage of modeling language, here SysML identification of errors and risk = identify negative influences and risk Gao et al[103] SysML based digital system model or sets of models that help integrate other discipline specific engineering models and simulations, which is initiated at the start and evolves through the system's lifecycle used or integration and to support optimization, simulation and analysis Kamburjan and Stromberg[104] formal model of a real target system that mirrors structure and behavior sufficiently for prototyping and to evaluate changes, digital twins are a variant of this prototyping and to evaluate changes and digital twins…”