Introduction to the Safecomp 2014 Workshop: DEvelopment, Verification and VAlidation of cRiTical Systems (DEVVARTS '14)

Abstract

The DEVVARTS '14 workshop focuses on novel methods for the development, verification and validation (V&V) and certification of Critical Systems, where the necessary effort for V&V frequently exceeds the core development time when using traditional methods. The "soft" IT industry rapidly turns to system integration based on the reuse of hardware and software components, but for safety related applications this will still evolve primarily due to the lack of composable V&V and certification. All this poses serious difficulties to companies, which are on one hand constrained to meet predefined quality goals, whereas, on the other hand, are required to deliver systems at acceptable cost and time to market. Large companies mainly follow a brute-force approach by focused large volume investment into tooling and in-house training, but even high-tech SMEs are highly vulnerable to the new challenges. Definition of methods, strategies and tools assuring an adequate and simultaneously productive V&V is one of the most challenging goals. It is hard to establish a proper tradeoff between achievable quality with a particular technique (in terms of RAMS attributes) and the costs required for achieving it. The situation is even worse in the case of integration of existing SW in a safety critical system to be certified, since, assessing products which encompass COTS software is a challenge although modern standards consider this possibility. An additional concern is the usage of recently adopted methods for SW development like MDD, since the certification of systems using software developed with these supports is at the limit of the applicability of the existing standards, and only the most recent ones are aligned with these 'modern' methods. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.