The 1st INTENTIONAL Workshop on Software Certification Program

Keynote Talk, Wednesday Nov. 30 at 1:00pm - 2:00pm

• EXPERIENCE APPLYING V&V PROCESS FOR THE CERTIFICATIONOF A LARGE COMPLEX INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM: ISSUES AND STATE OF THE PRACTICE
  Alberto Avritzer

Session #1, Wednesday Nov. 30 at 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Certification Approaches and Challenges

1. CHALLENGES FOR AN OPEN AND EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO SAFETY ASSURANCE AND CERTIFICATION OF SAFETY-CRITICAL SYSTEMS
   Hua'scar Espinoza, Alejandra Ruiz, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Paolo Panaroni.
   (Presenter: Jose Luis de la Vara)
2. USING MODEL-DRIVEN ENGINEERING FOR MANAGING SAFETY EVIDENCE: CHALLENGES, VISION AND EXPERIENCE
   Rajwinder Kaur Panesar-Walawege, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Lionel Briand
3. TOWARDS GOAL-BASED SOFTWARE SAFETY CERTIFICATION BASED ON PRESCRIPTIVE STANDARDS
   Erik Stensrud, Torbjørn Skramstad, Jingyue Li and Jing Xie

Session #2, Wednesday Nov. 30 at 3:30pm - 5:30pm
Certification Support and Practical Experiences

1. THE PRECERTIFICATION KIT FOR OPERATING SYSTEMS IN SAFETY DOMAINS
   Domenico Cotroneo, Domenico Di Leo, Nuno Silva, Ricardo Barbosa
2. INDEPENDENT TEST VERIFICATION: WHAT METRICS HAVE A WORD TO SAY
   Nuno Silva, Rui Lopes
3. DESIGN IMPROVEMENT OF SYSTEM ADMINISTRATIVE OPERATIONS FOR CERTIFICATION
   Kumiko Tadano, Jiangwen Xiang, Fumio Machida, Yoshiharu Maeno, Takao Osaki, Atsushi Kobayashi
4. ERROR MODELS AND SOFTWARE CERTIFICATION
   William E. Howden
5. GENERATION OF CERTIFIABLY CORRECT PROGRAMS FROM FORMAL MODELS
   Alexei Iliasov
6. INVESTIGATION ON SAFETY-RELATED STANDARDS FOR CRITICAL SYSTEMS
   Christian Esposito, Domenico Cotroneo, Nuno Silva

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Organizers: 

Roberto Pietrantuono and Nuno Silva

Certification of software is becoming crucial for companies developing mission and safety critical systems. As a result of software-related disasters, some professionals believe that licensing or certification is nowadays inevitable. At present, there is no agreement on what development and assessment methods, techniques, tools, or even evaluation metrics are more suitable to provide evidences on which to base software certification. Several organizations (such as FAA, NRC, EUROCONTROL, CENELEC, IEC, ISO) produced in the past standards for developing critical systems in different domains, e.g., avionics, railway, automotive, nuclear, healthcare. These process-oriented standards (e.g., DO-178B) are conceived to suggest strategies and practices to be adopted along the entire development cycle. Although they provide a valuable support, the guidelines they suggest are quite general, since their purpose is not to define what techniques a company must use, or what is their impact on company’s cost. For instance, cost and effectiveness issues are often neglected in such guidance documents. As a consequence, there is a gap between what they suggest and strategies, techniques, and tools that can actually be adopted by a company. For many of the proposed practices, there are contradictory studies about their actual effectiveness, and no definitive evidence that justifies their adoption. This uncertainty poses serious difficulties to companies, which on one hand are constrained to meet predefined certification goals, whereas, on the other hand, are required to deliver systems at competitive cost and time. On the other hand, an increasing number of practitioners believe that standard guidelines should focus not only on process, but also on product properties, and that companies should provide evidences regarding the actual product behavior, rather than their development process. This shifting from process-oriented to product-based certification is enforced by the increasing adoption of third- party (both commercial and open source) software components also in critical system. However, the adoption of off-the-shelf (OTS) software item raises also challenges and difficulties related to their integration, verification, assessment and maintenance, making it very tough to produce evidences that they behave safely. Also this new view is opening totally new challenges with respect to the current reference standards, for both developers and standard organizations.

Objectives

The workshop aims to:

provide a meeting for discussing the state of the art in Software Certification research in several domains of critical systems development, such as avionics, space, railway, automotive, nuclear, healthcare

Enable academia, industry, certification authorities/agencies, and government representatives to share their experiences in applied research in Software Certification related topics, and the most challenging issues they currently face

Discuss results of theoretical and experimental research on software certification

Discuss results of industrial experiences on real case studies reporting on the usage of formalisms, techniques, strategies, tools, and methodologies to develop certifiable systems

Identify new challenges in these areas and drive the research efforts in both critical systems software development, and in the current practices and guidelines suggested by standards.

Topics of Interest

Researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry, as well as people from government and certification authorities, that work on different aspects of software certification, are invited to participate. Papers should present original contributions on:

Methodological improvements of development process of software to be certified.

Modelling techniques, formalisms, measurements processes, new metrics, techniques, strategies, and tools for:

• safety analysis, and safety evidences formalization and quantification for certification purposes;
• design practices conciliating requirements and constraints of certification standards with the needs of modern, complex, component-based systems, as well as with the needs of developer companies;
• cost-effective Verification & Validation specifically oriented towards certification goals;
• assessment of safety-related qualities in software systems to be certified;
• safety assessment and evidences formalization, selection, integration, development, and verification of commercial OTS and OSS components in the context of software certification;
• design, development, V&V, evidences formalization, and assessment to support product-based certification.

Practical experiences on real case studies regarding certified software or software to be certified.

Important Dates

Full paper submission (firm): 09/16/2011
Research paper notification: 09/23/2011
Submission of camera-ready copy: 09/28/2011

Submission Instructions

Paper submission

Authors are invited to submit high quality unpublished research work. After rigorous review, all the accepted papers will be included in the ISSRE supplemental proceedings, and included in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. Papers must be written in English and be formatted according to the IEEE authoring guidelines [1]. Full papers should not exceed the size limit of six pages IEEE style. Paper submission will be done electronically through this page – See Submission Instructions above. Submission implies the willingness of at least one of the authors to register and present the paper, if accepted.

Keynote Speaker

Keynote Title
Experience Applying V&V Process for the Certification of a Large Complex Industrial System: issues and state of the practice.
Abstract
In this talk we present our experience applying a V&V process for the certification of a large complex industrial system. Specifically, we focus on the definition and validation of the performance, scalability, and reliability non-functional requirements. We present the motivation for the certification approach used , the description of the implementation of the requirements document and the modeling, testing and analysis approaches. We conclude by presenting the issues we faced over the three year certification period. We conclude by describe the practical approaches we developed to overcome these issues.
Biography
Alberto Avritzer received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, an M.Sc. in Computer Science for the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and the B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He is currently a Senior Member of the Technical Staff in the Software Engineering Department at Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, New Jersey. Before moving to Siemens Corporate Research, he spent 13 years at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he developed tools and techniques for performance testing and analysis. He spent the summer of 1987 at IBM Research, at Yorktown Heights. His research interests are in software engineering, particularly software testing, monitoring and rejuvenation of smoothly degrading systems, and metrics to assess software architecture, and he has published over 50 papers in journals and refereed conference proceedings in those areas. He has extensive experience in the certification of large complex industrial system is the telecommunications, rail-automation, and power domains. He is a member of ACM SIGSOFT, and IEEE.

Organizing Committee

Honorary Chair
Kishor S. Trivedi, Duke University, USA

Workshop Co-Chairs
Roberto Pietrantuono, Universita' di Napoli Federico II, Italy
Nuno Silva, Critical Software, S.A. Portugal

Program Committee Members
Lisa Montgomery, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), USA
Anapathur V Ramesh, Boeing, USA
Yun I-Liu, Boeing, USA
Ricardo M Fricks, Boeing, USA
Rao Mannepalli, Lockheed Martin, USA
Henrique Madeira, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Marco Vieira, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Stefano Russo, Universita' di Napoli Federico II, Italy
Domenico Cotroneo, Universita' di Napoli Federico II, Italy
Ricardo Barbosa, Critical Software, S.A., Portugal
Francesco Rogo, Finmeccanica, Italy
Kumiko Tadano, NEC, Japan
Jianwen Xiang, NEC, Japan
Tatsuhiro Tsuchiya, Osaka University, Japan
Takaji Fujiwara, SRATECH Lab., Japan
Roberto Natella, Universita' di Napoli Federico II, Italy
Domenico Di Leo, Universita' di Napoli Federico II, Italy

[1] http://www.computer.org/portal/web/cscps/formatting

This workshop has been organized in the context of the CRITICAL-STEP project (http://www.critical-step.eu), Marie Curie Industry-Academia Partnerships and Pathways (IAPP) number 230672, and within the context of the project “Dependable Off-The-Shelf based middleware systems for Large-scale Complex Critical Infrastructures” (DOTS-LCCI, http://dots-lcci.prin.dis.unina.it).