Supporting model based design

• Authors: Rémi Delmas;David Doose;Anthony Fernandes Pires;Thomas Polacsek
• Venue: MEDI'11 Proceedings of the First international conference on Model and data engineering
• Year: 2011

In software systems engineering, the generally understood goal of verification is to assess the compliance of a software component with respect to the inputs and standards applying to a given phase in the design process. The goal of validation is to determine if the requirements are correct and complete, and validation is performed in the final system assessment phase. Nevertheless, the introduction of formal methods in model based engineering tends to blur the boundary between verification and validation, by allowing validation tasks to be performed early in the process, before the system has been fully designed and implemented. In particular, we consider recent work using constraint satisfaction techniques to perform formal verification and validation tasks at model level. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, we attempt to fit the existing methods and tools in a global design, verification and validation process. Second, we show that in addition to verification and validation, constraint based techniques can be used to automate part of the design activity itself, by synthesizing correct by construction and quantitatively optimal models from a specification.