Industrial systems are reaching an unprecedented degree of complexity. The process of designing a complex system is expensive, time consuming and error-prone. Moreover, the design process has to guarantee not only the functional correctness of the implemented system, but also its dependability and resilience with respect to run-time faults. Hence, the design process must characterize the likelihood of faults, mitigate possible failures, and assess the effectiveness of the adopted mitigation measures.
Formal methods have been increasingly used over the last decades to deal with the shortcomings of designing a complex system. Formal methods are based on the adoption of a formal, mathematical model of the system, shared between all actors involved in the system design, and on a tool-supported methodology to aid all the steps of the design, from the definition of the architecture down to the final implementation in HW and SW. Formal methods include technologies such as model checking, an automatic technique to symbolically and exhaustively analyze all possible executions of the system in the formal model, in order to detect design flaws as early as possible. Model checking techniques have been recently extended to assess the safety and dependability characteristics of the design, and for system certification.
The objective of this study is to advance the state-of-the-art in system design using formal methods. This includes adapting and extending the system design methodology, investigating improved versions of state-of-the-art routines for verification and safety assessment of complex systems, and developing novel extensions to address open problems. Examples of such extensions include novel techniques for contract-based design and contract-based safety assessment, advanced techniques for formal verification based on compositional reasoning, the analysis of the timing aspects of fault propagation, the characterization of transient and sporadic faults, the analysis of the effectiveness of fault mitigation measures in presence of complex fault patterns, and the modeling of analysis of systems with continuous and hybrid dynamics.
This study will exploit the challenges and benchmarks defined in various industrial projects carried out at FBK.
