Rajwinder Kaur Panesar-Walawege successfully defended her PhD

Critical systems such as those found in the avionics, automotive, maritime, and energy domains are often subject to a formal process known as certification. The goal of certification is to ensure that such systems will operate safely in the presence of known hazards, and without posing undue risks to the users, the public, or the environment. A key prerequisite for effective collection of evidence is that the system suppliers be aware of the requirements stipulated in the relevant standard and the evidence they require.

This often proves to be a very challenging task because of the sheer size of the standards and the fact that the textual standards are amenable to subjective interpretation. Notably, suppliers find it hard to interpret the evidence requirements imposed by the safety standards within the domain of application; little support exists for recording, querying, and reporting evidence in a structured manner; and there is a general absence of guidelines on how the collected evidence supports the safety objectives.

The main contribution of this thesis is a model-driven process that enables the automated verification of compliance to standards based on evidence. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is used to create a UML profile based on a conceptual model of a given standard, which provides a succinct and explicit interpretation of the underlying standard. The profile is augmented with constraints that help system suppliers with establishing a relationship between the concepts in the safety standard of interest and the concepts in the application domain. This in turn enables suppliers to demonstrate how their system development artifacts achieve compliance to the standard.

Additionally, UML profiles are further used to systematically capture how the evidence requirements of a generic standard are specialized in a particular domain. This provides a means of explicitly showing the relationship between a generic and a sector-specific standard. This tackles the certification issues that arise from poorly-stated or implicit relationships between generic standards and their sector-specific interpretations.

Finally, the tool infrastructure needs for supporting the collection and management of safety evidence data is tackled by proposing tools for upfront planning of evidence collection activities and the storage of evidence information outside of modelling environments.

The thesis is written within the field of software verification and validation in software engineering. The work has been conducted at Simula Research Laboratory.

Prior to the defense, Rajwinder Kaur Panesar-Walawege presented her trial lecture UML or DSL to model and reason about safety standards?

The adjudication committee

• Professor Daniel Amyot, School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, Canada.
• Dr. Benoit Baudry, INRIA, France
• Associate Professor Arne Maus, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway.
  

Chair of the disputation

• Dr. Dag Langmyhr, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway.

Supervisors

• Professor Lionel C. Briand, Certus Software V&V Lab, Simula Research Laboratory
• Research Scientist, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Certus Software V&V Lab, Simula Research Laboratory

Read more:
Announcement of the PhD defense at the University of Oslo's web pages.