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Verifying and Validating Autonomous Systems: Towards an Integrated Approach

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Runtime Verification (RV 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11237))

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Abstract

When applying formal verification to a system that interacts with the real world we must use a model of the environment. This model represents an abstraction of the actual environment, but is necessarily incomplete and hence presents an issue for system verification. If the actual environment matches the model, then the verification is correct; however, if the environment falls outside the abstraction captured by the model, then we cannot guarantee that the system is well-behaved. A solution to this problem consists in exploiting the model of the environment for statically verifying the system’s behaviour and, if the verification succeeds, using it also for validating the model against the real environment via runtime verification. The paper discusses this approach and demonstrates its feasibility by presenting its implementation on top of a framework integrating the Agent Java PathFinder model checker. Trace expressions are used to model the environment for both static formal verification and runtime verification.

Work supported by EPSRC as part of the Verifiable Autonomy research project [EP/L024845] and the FAIR-SPACE [EP/R026092], ORCA [EP/R026173], and RAIN [EP/R026084] Robotics and AI Hubs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Full source code can be found in the MCAPL distribution: mcapl.sourceforge.net. Code for the examples is also available from the University of Liverpool together with experimental data – DOI: https://doi.org/10.17638/datacat.liverpool.ac.uk/438.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università di Genova, Genova, Italy

    Angelo Ferrando, Davide Ancona & Viviana Mascardi

  2. Liverpool University, Liverpool, UK

    Louise A. Dennis & Michael Fisher

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  1. Angelo Ferrando
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  2. Louise A. Dennis
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  3. Davide Ancona
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  5. Viviana Mascardi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Viviana Mascardi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Malta, Msida, Malta

    Christian Colombo

  2. University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany

    Martin Leucker

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Ferrando, A., Dennis, L.A., Ancona, D., Fisher, M., Mascardi, V. (2018). Verifying and Validating Autonomous Systems: Towards an Integrated Approach. In: Colombo, C., Leucker, M. (eds) Runtime Verification. RV 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11237. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03769-7_15

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