Preface: special issue on NASA Formal Methods Symposium 2010

Abstract

TheNASAFormalMethods Symposium (NFM) is an annual event intended to highlight the state of formal methods art and practice. It is a forum for theoreticians and practitioners from government, academia, and industry, with the goals of identifying challenges and providing solutions for achieving high assurance in safety-critical systems. Within NASA, for example, such systems include autonomous robots, separation assurance algorithms for aircraft, and autonomous rendezvous and docking systems for spacecraft. Moreover, emerging paradigms such as code generation and safety cases are bringing with them new challenges and opportunities. The focus of the symposium is on formal techniques, their theory, current capabilities, and limitations, as well as their application to aerospace, robotics, and other safety-critical systems. This journal issue contains extended versions of the best papers presented at the Second NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM 2010), held at NASA Headquarters, in Washington D.C., USA, April 13–15, 2010. The gap between tools used by industry and the verification techniques developed in academia is a major obstacle in the general adoption of formal methods technology. Closing this gap is the subject of two papers appearing in this special issue. Pritam Roy and Natarajan Shankar propose the SimCheck tool for checking contract specifications in Simulink, a commercial tool for modeling and simulating embedded systems. These contract specifications are written using an expressive type annotation system. From the Simulink models and their contract specifications, the tool generates verification conditions which can be discharged using static analysers. Dominic Richards and David Lester