Common use of Verification and Validation Clause in Contracts

Verification and Validation. ‌ When dealing with complex autonomic systems one needs to face the problem of the development and of the validation of the models used for planning and for execution control. Indeed, while it is important for a large class of autonomic systems to integrate sensing and acting functionalities, controlled by deliberation mechanism (e.g. planning and execution control), the actual integration very often follows simple rules of thumb, which do not rely on any clear verification and validation approach. Nevertheless, the autonomy requirement of these systems keeps rising, and they need a more flexible approach to handle the used resources. These systems are deployed for increasingly complex tasks; and it becomes more and more important to prove that they are safe, dependable, and correct. This is particularly true for rovers used in expensive and distant missions, such as Mars rovers, that need to avoid equipment damage and minimize resource usage, but also for robots that have to interact regularly and in close contact with humans or other robots. Consequently, we think that it is becoming very common to require software integrators and developers to provide guarantees and formal proofs as certification. Formal verification is an attractive alternative to traditional methods of testing and simulation that can be used to provide correctness guarantees. By formal verification we mean not just the traditional notion of program verification, where the correctness of code is at question. We more broadly mean design verification, where an abstract model of a system is checked for desired behavioural properties. Finding a bug in a design is more cost-effective than finding the manifestation of the design flow in the code. The ASCENS approach relies on the integration of two state-of-the-art technologies for verification and validation, namely D-Finder [BBNS09, BGL+11] and SBIP [BBD+12]. They are both based on BIP, a formal framework for building heterogeneous and complex component-based systems [BBS06]. Notably, thanks to the formal operational semantics of the SCEL language outlined in the previous section, BIP models can be obtained from static SCEL descriptions (i.e. involving only bounded creation/deletion of components and processes) by exploring a set of transformations rules.

Verification and Validation. ‌ When dealing with complex autonomic systems one needs to face the problem of the development and of the validation of the models used for planning and for execution control. Indeed, while it is important for a large class of autonomic systems to integrate sensing and acting functionalities, controlled by deliberation mechanism (e.g. planning and execution control), the actual integration very often follows simple rules of thumb, which do not rely on any clear verification and validation approach. Nevertheless, the autonomy requirement of these systems keeps rising, and they need a more flexible flexi- ble approach to handle the used resources. These systems are deployed for increasingly complex tasks; and it becomes more and more important to prove that they are safe, dependable, and correct. This is particularly true for rovers used in expensive and distant missions, such as Mars roversrovers [BdSIY13], that need to avoid equipment damage and minimize resource usage, but also for robots that have to interact regularly and in close contact with humans or other robots. Consequently, we think that it is becoming very common to require software integrators and developers to provide guarantees and formal proofs as certification. Formal verification is an attractive alternative to traditional methods of testing and simulation that can be used to provide correctness guarantees. By formal verification we mean not just the traditional notion of program verification, where the correctness of code is at question. We more broadly mean design verification, where an abstract model of a system is checked for desired behavioural properties. Finding a bug in a design is more cost-effective than finding the manifestation of the design flow in the code. The ASCENS approach relies on the integration of two state-of-the-art technologies for verification and validation, namely D-Finder [BBNS09, BGL+11] and SBIP [BBD+12]. They are both based on BIP, a formal framework for building heterogeneous and complex component-based systems [BBS06]. Notably, thanks to the formal operational semantics of the SCEL language outlined in the previous section, BIP models can be obtained from static SCEL descriptions (i.e. involving only bounded creation/deletion of components and processes) by exploring a set of transformations rules. For further details about the application of verification and validation techniques and correspond- ing tools the reader is referred to the ASCENS Joint Deliverable JD3.1. [Be13]. 5jRESP website: ▇▇▇▇://▇▇▇▇.▇▇▇▇▇▇.▇▇▇/p/jresp/