Software Verification Research Articles

An Online Distance Tracker for Verification of Robotic Systems’ Safety

This paper presents an efficient method for minimum distance calculation between a robot and its environment and the implementation framework as a tool for the verification of robotic systems' safety. Collision is the most fundamental safety problem in robotic systems. Therefore, robotic system software must be verified to ensure that there are no risks of collision during development and implementation. The online distance tracker (ODT) is intended to provide minimum distances between the robots and their environments for verification of system software to inspect whether it causes a collision risk. The proposed method employs the representations of the robot and its environment with cylinders and an occupancy map. Furthermore, the bounding box approach improves the performance of the minimum distance calculation regarding computational cost. Finally, the method is applied to a realistically simulated twin of the ROKOS, which is an automated robotic inspection cell for quality control of automotive body-in-white and is actively used in the bus manufacturing industry. The simulation results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Environmental noise modeling, quality control, verification, and validation concepts

Over the past 30 + year's noise modeling has developed in all engineering fields. ISO 9001 has developed detail simulation validation criteria's for variouse engineering fields. Engineering software application for environmental noise modeling are just one of many fields that offer advanced simulation options. Unfortunately, the validation of environmental noise simulation is still under development. With the increase of environmental noise projects the model validation between test and simulation is scrutinized by the public or in court. The presentation discusses the definition of Model, Mathematical Model, Computational Model and Conceptual Models and the definition of Verification, Validation and Updating. What are the tools for quality assurance (QA) for the noise modeling software, software verification and project quality control (QC)? What is the state of noise modeling standards in North America? What are the uncertainties and variabilities that the environmental noise engineer can control? Are we sure that we are modeling a worst-case scenario? What can consultants do to improve the quality of noise simulations.

Ergo, SMIRK is safe: a safety case for a machine learning component in a pedestrian automatic emergency brake system

Integration of machine learning (ML) components in critical applications introduces novel challenges for software certification and verification. New safety standards and technical guidelines are under development to support the safety of ML-based systems, e.g., ISO 21448 SOTIF for the automotive domain and the Assurance of Machine Learning for use in Autonomous Systems (AMLAS) framework. SOTIF and AMLAS provide high-level guidance but the details must be chiseled out for each specific case. We initiated a research project with the goal to demonstrate a complete safety case for an ML component in an open automotive system. This paper reports results from an industry-academia collaboration on safety assurance of SMIRK, an ML-based pedestrian automatic emergency braking demonstrator running in an industry-grade simulator. We demonstrate an application of AMLAS on SMIRK for a minimalistic operational design domain, i.e., we share a complete safety case for its integrated ML-based component. Finally, we report lessons learned and provide both SMIRK and the safety case under an open-source license for the research community to reuse.

Review of Software Quality Verification and Evaluation Methods

The basic concepts in the field of software quality testing and evaluation are defined. In particular, the concepts of verification, validation and software lifecycle and their role in the testing process are considered. The concept of an artifact in the software lifecycle is considered. The Russian and international standards in the field of software quality assessment are taken into account. The existing methods of software verification are regarded: expertise, static analysis, formal methods, dynamic and synthetic methods.An overview of software quality assessment methods used in software development and testing cycles is presented. Functional and administrative factors affecting software quality are also considered. The article lists modern testing automation tools that can be used today. The review material of the article will be useful for software developers, novice testers and related specialists.

Guest editorial: special issue on emerging challenges in software certification and verification

Guest editorial: special issue on emerging challenges in software certification and verification

Creating Efficiencies in your Automotive Processes from the Start

CGTech's VERICUT verification software is ensuring that processes are delivering accurate parts as efficiently and quickly as possible, without collisions and downtime

The Use of Exploratory Software Testing in SCRUM

Exploratory testing is a very common, yet under researched, software testing technique. Research has shown how this technique can provide a better insight about the system under test than other techniques, that it can find defects more efficiently than other testing approaches and even aid the design of other techniques. This research aims at increasing the understanding of exploratory testing and the way it is used within industries utilizing SCRUM. Another aim is to identify and understand the factors that enable the tester to use this technique successfully. The decision to set the study in SCRUM comes from the fact that this Agile management framework is the most popular in industry and from the suggestion to focus on the relationship between Agile and exploratory testing. Also, the choice of a specific context adds significance to the findings. This research will be conducted in a Sheffield based company, which produces data analytics software. The methodology will consist of three phases. During Phase 1 (Identification), SCRUM practitioners will be interviewed about the use of exploratory testing in SCRUM and the success factors of this technique. The aim of Phase 2 (Confirmation) will be to confirm the findings from Phase 1. This will be accomplished with focus groups and widely-distributed online survey. Finally, during Phase 3 (Verification), practitioners will take part to experiments to verify that the success factors identified during the first two phases enable efficient and effective exploratory testing. The purpose of this research is to enrich the academic field of software verification and validation, but also to provide industries utilising SCRUM with useful guidance.

Complete formal verification of the PSTM transaction Scheduler

State of the art formal verification is based on formal methods and its goal is proving given correctness properties. For example, a PSTM scheduler was modeled in CSP in order to prove deadlock-freeness and starvation-freeness. However, as this paper shows, using solely formal methods is not sufficient. Therefore, in this paper we propose a complete formal verification of trustworthy software, which jointly uses formal verification and formal model testing. As an example, we first test the previous CSP model of PSTM transaction scheduler by comparing the model checker PAT results with the manually derived expected results, for the given test workloads. Next, according to the results of this testing, we correct and extend the CSP model. Finally, using PAT results for the new CSP model, we analyze the performance of the PSTM online transaction scheduling algorithms from the perspective of the relative speedup.

An initial study of quality assurance techniques for automated water level control systems

This study aims to formulate requirements for models and programs of cyber-physical systems through an investigation of existing approaches to dynamic verification of control programs. Building on this research, we propose a formal model for dynamic verification of process-oriented control programs in cyber-physical systems. Additionally, our goal is to develop a software package based on the proposed methods and models. The research focuses on hyperprocesses, which involve multiple interacting processes with executable states. The complexity of the models being created and the prevalence of routine operations present challenges in applying formal methods to their verification. Neglecting the verification of process-oriented software poses significant risks in system development. Therefore, addressing this challenge involves research and development of dynamic software verification methods that combine testing and simulation techniques.

Formal Verification of the Control Software of a Radioactive Material Remote Handling System, Based on IEC 61499

Formal Verification of the Control Software of a Radioactive Material Remote Handling System, Based on IEC 61499

Repercussion of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives and work of ICU nursing technicians.

To investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on personal dimensions and its relationship with the work context of nursing technicians who worked in ICUs. A cross-sectional mixed-method study (convergent parallel). A total of 229 nursing technicians from intensive care units participated and responded a questionnaire. The study was conducted using the IRaMuTeQ software for lexicographic verification and similarity analysis of the corpus and the Minitab 19 software for comparison between means and logistic regression. Fear was found that the biggest impact on the lives of nursing technicians. The professionals experienced stress and anxiety as a consequence of the fear of Coronavirus infection and its transmission to their families. The pandemic affected the daily personal lives of nursing technicians, in the same work context, in different ways.

Non-Classical Logics in Modern Science

Non-classical logicians have significantly expanded the traditional field of using logical methods. The first of them was the three-digit logic of Y. Lukasevich. Next came the three-digit logic of A. Bochvar, the "quantum logics" of G. Reichenbach and P. Detush-Fevrier, infinite-valued, probabilistic and other logics. The possibilities of non-classical logics have become widely used in various branches of scientific knowledge. Polysemantic, fuzzy, intuitionistic, modal, relevant and paranoherent, temporal and other non-classical logics are widely used today in physics, computational mathematics, computer science, linguistics, jurisprudence, ethics and other fields of natural science and socio-humanitarian knowledge. The recently increased interest in non-classical logics is explained, first of all, by the fact that various philosophical, syntactic, semantic and metalogical problems that were previously discussed in the scientific community are being replaced by practical interests. The main source of such interest is their wide application in computer science, artificial intelligence and programming. The logic of causality is used in the interpretation of the concepts of "law of nature", "ontological necessity" and "determinism"; temporal modal logics - for modeling, specification and verification of software systems of logical control; logics with vector semantics, combining the features of fuzzy and para-contradictory logics - in solving problems of dynamic verification of production knowledge bases and expert systems.

Finding More Bugs with Software Model Checking using Delta Debugging

Many verification tasks in model checking (one of the formal software verification approaches) can’t be solved within bounded time requirements due to combinatorial state space explosion. In order to find a bug in the verified program in a given time, a simplified version of it can be analyzed. This paper presents DD** algorithms (based on the Delta Debugging approach) to iterate over simplified versions of the given program. These algorithms were implemented in software-verification tool CPAchecker. Our experiments showed that this technique might be used to find new bugs in real software.

Predicate Abstraction Refinement in Thread-Modular Analysis

Thread-modular approach over predicate abstraction is an efficient technique for software verification of complicated real-world source code. One of the main problems in the technique is a predicate abstraction refinement in a multithreaded case. A default predicate refiner considers only a path related to one thread, and does not refine the thread-modular environment. For instance, if we have applied an effect from the second thread to the current one, then the path in the second thread to the applied effect is not refined. Our goal was to develop a more precise refinement procedure, reusing a default predicate refiner to refine both: a path in a current thread and a path to an effect in the environment. The idea is to construct a joined boolean formula from these two paths. Since some variables may be common, a key challenge is to correctly rename and equate variables in two parts of the formula to accurately represent the way threads interact. It is essential to get reliable predicates that can potentially prove spuriousness of the path. The proposed approach is implemented on top of CPAchecker framework. It is evaluated on standard SV-COMP benchmark set, and the results show some benefit. Evaluation on the real-world software does not demonstrate significant accuracy increase, as the described flaw of predicate refinement is not the only reason of false positive results. While the proposed approach can successfully prove some specific paths to be spurious, it is not enough to fully prove correctness of some programs. However, the approach has further potential for improvements.

Analysis of the interplay effect in lung stereotactic ablative radiation therapy based on both breathing motion and plan characteristics

Abstract Introduction: Stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR) is susceptible to challenges for tumours affected by intrafraction organ motion. This study aims to investigate the effect of breathing characteristics and plan complexity on the interplay effect. Methods: A patient-specific interplay effect evaluation was performed using in-house software with an alpha version of the treatment planning verification software Verisoft (PTW-Freiburg, Germany) on VMAT plans. The OCTAVIUS 4D phantom was used to acquire the static dose distribution, and the simulation approach was utilised to generate the moving dose distribution. The influence of plan complexity, PTV size, number of breaths, and motion amplitudes on the interplay effect were examined. The dose distribution of two extreme phases—end-inhale and end-exhale—was considered using the gamma criteria of 2%/2 mm for the interplay effect evaluation. Results: A strong correlation was found between the motion amplitude (p < 0.001) and the NBs (p < 0.001) with the gamma-passing rate. No correlation was found between the gamma-passing rate and the PTV size or plan complexity. Conclusion: The simulation tool allowed the analysis of a large number of breathing traces, demonstrating how free-breathing patients, suspected of high interplay, could be selected for other motion management solutions. The simulated cases showed strong interplay effects for long breathing periods with extended motion amplitudes in a small group of patients.

A hybrid method to improve efficiency of patient specific SRS and SBRT QA using 3D secondary dose verification.

Patient Specific QA (PSQA) by direct phantom measurement for all intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) cases is labor intensive and an inefficient use of the Medical Physicist's time. The purpose of this work was to develop a hybrid quality assurance (QA) technique utilizing 3D dose verification as a screening tool to determine if a measurement is necessary. This study utilized Sun Nuclear DoseCHECK (DC), a 3D secondary verification software, and Fraction 0, a trajectory log IMRT QA software. Twenty-two Lung stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) and thirty single isocentre multi-lesion SRS (MLSRS) plans were retrospectively analysed in DC. Agreement of DC and the TPS dose for selected dosimetric criteria was recorded. Calculated 95% confidence limits (CL) were used to establish action limits. All cases were delivered and measured using the Sun Nuclear stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) MapCheck. Trajectory logs of the delivery were used to calculate Fraction 0 results for the same criteria calculated by DC. Correlation of DC and Fraction 0 results were calculated. Phantom measured QA was compared to Fraction 0 QA results for the cases which had DC criteria action limits exceeded. Correlation of DC and Fraction 0 results were excellent, demonstrating the same action limits could be used for both and DC can predict Fraction 0 results. Based on the calculated action limits, zero lung SBRT cases and six MLSRS cases were identified as requiring a measurement. All plans that passed the DC screening had a passing measurement based PSQA and agreed with Fraction 0 results. Using 95% CL action limits of dosimetric criteria, a 3D secondary dose verification can be used to determine if a measurement is required for PSQA. This method is efficient for it is part of the normal clinical workflow when verifying any clinical treatment. In addition, it can drastically reduce the number of measurements needed for PSQA.

Autonomous Leader–Follower Formation of Vehicular Robots Using the Lyapunov Method

This paper focuses on the control of two self-driven vehicles (leader–follower) in a multi-obstacle environment, while maintaining formation. The acceleration-based control input design governs the overall movement and control of the rovers. This is accomplished through the application of APF functions that support the leader robot to reach the desired target while avoiding obstacles and maintaining formation. The Lyapunov theorem was used for the control design of the leader and follower vehicles. An effective mathematical model was designed and run through the MATLAB software for simulation verification. The simulation results obtained illustrate the behavior of the leader–follower vehicles with respect to the controllers designed. Therefore, this paper looks at the efficiency of the vehicles to converge at a predefined target, from random points in a predefined workspace, while avoiding fixed and moving obstacles. The technique may be applied in transportation and defense sectors where environments are a risk prone to human health or safety.

Design and Implementation of Identity Verification Software Based on Deep Learning

Identity verification, a noncontact biometric identification technology, has important scientific significance in theoretical research and shows great practical value in national security, public safety, and finance. In view of this situation, this paper designs an identity verification software based on deep learning, which has been successfully applied to real-world applications. The central idea of the software can be summarized as follows: First, the lightweight multi-task cascaded convolutional network (MTCNN), which can learn correlations between face detection and alignment, is employed for face detection. The software then conducts face recognition with MobileFaceNet which is an efficient and lightweight neural network, reducing the hardware cost. The test results show that the software meets the design requirements and can complete the corresponding identity confirmation function.

Designing artificial intelligence for deep software testing using the method of Model Checking

Modeling and verification issues of software systems have a significant place in the study of the mathematical theory of programming. This is mostly due to the importance of establishing a theoretical basis for the creation of dependable software. This page describes in depth Model Checking, the most used method for modeling and verifying software systems.

Teaching the Discipline "Software Testing and Verification" to Future Programmers

Teaching the Discipline "Software Testing and Verification" to Future Programmers