Finite safety models for high-assurance systems

Author: John C. Sloan Title: Finite Safety Models for High-Assurance Systems Institution: Florida Atlantic University Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Year: 2010 Preventing bad things from happening to engineered systems, demands improvements to how we model their operation with regard to safety. Safety-critical and fiscally-critical systems both demand automated and exhaustive verification, which is only possible if the models of these systems, along with the number of scenarios spawned from these models, are tractably finite. To this end, this dissertation addresses problems of a model’s tractability and usefulness. It addresses the state space minimization problem by initially considering tradeoffs between state space size and level of detail or fidelity. It then considers the problem of human interpretation in model capture from system artifacts, by seeking to automate model capture. It introduces human control over level of detail and hence state space size during model