Workshop Explores Challenges and Progress on Certification of Real-Time Cyber-Physical Systems
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November 15, 2024—A recently released report coauthored by Software Engineering Institute (SEI) staff describes an experiment to advance the assurance of cyber-physical systems. The report by the Assurance Evidence for Continuously Evolving Real-Time Systems (ASERT) Workgroup documents the group’s second workshop, held earlier this year.
In software development, assurance activities provide evidence that the product is ready for operation and will work as intended. Certifiers use that evidence to decide whether or not to certify the system for operation. The ASERT group consists of software researchers, developers, and certifiers from the SEI, industry, government, and academia. It formed in 2022 to explore two topics: techniques to reduce the time to certify and recertify ever larger and more complex systems, and methods to certify systems that adopt new hardware and software paradigms.
ASERT met at the SEI in July to discuss an experiment performed by some of the group’s members: the modeling and analysis of the safe failover modes of a commercial airliner’s flight management software. The workshop report, coauthored by ASERT members including the SEI’s Dionisio de Niz, Bjorn Andersson, and Mark Klein, captures the experiment’s outcomes and the group’s discussion of alternative solutions and the frameworks and presentation of assurance evidence used for the model and analysis.
The report also conveys the remarks by the workshop’s keynote speakers: Douglas Schmidt, director of operational test and evaluation for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Christopher Collins, executive director of developmental test, evaluation, and assessment for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)).
The challenge of software assurance and certification is growing as software systems expand and change. ASERT’s work supports the assurance of continuously evolving systems, one of the six research focus areas identified in the 2021 SEI report Architecting the Future of Software Engineering: A National Agenda for Software Engineering Research & Development.
Read the report Assurance Evidence of Continuously Evolving Real-Time Systems (ASERT) Workshop 2024, and learn more about ASERT on the group’s website. Learn more about the SEI’s research and development in cyber-physical systems in the SEI Blog.
