Empirical Formal Methods: Guidelines for Performing Empirical Studies on Formal Methods

Beek, Maurice H. ter; Ferrari, Alessio

doi:10.3390/software1040017

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 195 publications

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“…The evaluation follows the guidelines for performing empirical studies on formal methods [57] where appropriate. The generated models, scripts for running the experiments, and the measurement data is available online [58].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applicability of Model Checking for Verifying Spacecraft Operational Designs

Chrszon,

Maurer,

Saleip

et al. 2023

2023 ACM/IEEE 26th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS)

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Guaranteeing safety and correctness is one of the main objectives during the development of space systems. This is a challenging task, since many different engineering disciplines are involved in the development and the constituent parts of a spacecraft are highly interconnected and interdependent. Increasingly, formal methods such as model checking are applied to verify safety-critical parts of spacecraft designs and also implementation, since they may prove the absence of design errors. Generally, a major challenge for adopting model checking into the design process is its scalability. Usually, the whole state space of a system, which grows exponentially with, e.g., the number of parallel processes, must be explored.In this paper, we consider operational designs of spacecraft as they may occur during early development phases and systematically evaluate the scalability of model checking for verifying such models. For this, we created an arbitrarily scalable operational design describing the mode management of a satellite. Transformations of the models into the modeling languages of different model-checking tools enables a comparative scalability study of various model-checking algorithms. The evaluation shows promising results for symbolic model-checking approaches. A comparatively low analysis time and memory usage suggest that model checking for early operational designs can be incorporated into existing design processes.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applicability of Model Checking for Verifying Spacecraft Operational Designs

Chrszon,

Maurer,

Saleip

et al. 2023

2023 ACM/IEEE 26th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS)

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Formal methods and tools for industrial critical systems

Lafuente¹,

Mavridou

2022

Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer

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A manifesto for applicable formal methods

Gleirscher,

van de Pol,

Woodcock

2023

Softw Syst Model

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Recently, formal methods have been used in large industrial organisations (including AWS, Facebook/Meta, and Microsoft) and have proved to be an effective part of a software engineering process finding important bugs. Perhaps because of that, practitioners are interested in using them more often. Nevertheless, formal methods are far less applied than expected, particularly for safety-critical systems where they are strongly recommended and have the most significant potential. We hypothesise that formal methods still seem not applicable enough or ready for their intended use in such areas. In critical software engineering, what do we mean when we speak of a formal method? And what does it mean for such a method to be applicable both from a scientific and practical viewpoint? Based on what the literature tells about the first question, with this manifesto, we identify key challenges and lay out a set of guiding principles that, when followed by a formal method, give rise to its mature applicability in a given scope. Rather than exercising criticism of past developments, this manifesto strives to foster increased use of formal methods in any appropriate context to the maximum benefit.

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Empirical Formal Methods: Guidelines for Performing Empirical Studies on Formal Methods

Cited by 4 publications

References 195 publications

Applicability of Model Checking for Verifying Spacecraft Operational Designs

Applicability of Model Checking for Verifying Spacecraft Operational Designs

Formal methods and tools for industrial critical systems

A manifesto for applicable formal methods

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