Verification and validation of distributed flight critical systems

This paper describes Honeywell's work on a NASA-sponsored multi-year program for verification and validation (V&V) of flight critical systems. The motivation for this work comes from the increasing complexity of integrated systems and the fact that there is often a gap between formal theory and real-world systems. For example, Byzantine fault tolerance is often overlooked in real-world systems, even though such failures have caused system-level failures [1], and the theory behind tolerating these failures has been well explored. The goals of this effort include: (1) providing advanced analytical, architectural, and testing capabilities to enable sound assurance of safety critical properties for distributed systems; (2) establishing a collection of reusable models supporting the validation and verification of a broad array of distributed systems, which enable effective engineering trade-offs to resolve debates about “best” design approaches; (3) improving open standards such as the Architecture Analysis Design Language (AADL); and (4) advancing the state-of-the-art in formal analysis and modeling tool chains.