We seek to increase user confidence in simulations as they are adapted to meet new requirements. Our approach includes formal representation of uncertainty, lightweight validation, and novel techniques for exploring emergent behavior. Uncertainty representation, using formalisms such as Dempster-Shafer theory, can capture designer insight about uncertainty, enabling formal analysis and improvin...

This paper discusses preliminary work on modeling and validation dynamic adaptation. The proposed approach is on the use of aspect-oriented modeling (AOM) and models at runtime. Our approach covers design and runtime phases. At design-time, a base model and different variant architecture models are designed and the adaptation model is built. Crucially, the adaptation model includes invariant pr...

0740-7475/00/$10.00 © 2000 IEEE October–December 2000 DESIGN IS AN ITERATION of specification and implementation phases, performed either top-down or bottom-up before resulting in a product. Validation is performed at each of these design phases until the final manufacturing stage. Correctness of an implementation is not an autonomous concept, but rather a relation between a specification and a...

We are concerned with the problem of deciding the validity of a complex plan involving interacting continuous activity. In these situations there is a need to model and reason about the continuous processes and events that arise as a consequence of the behaviour of the physical world in which the plan is expected to execute. In this paper we describe how events, which occur as the outcome of un...

A key reason for choosing agent-based simulation of a biological system over other kinds of simulation model is the potential for structural as well as behavioral correspondence between the simulation model and the modeled system. This correspondence both demands and makes possible new kinds of model validation. We propose evaluating model fidelity by introducing seeded faults that correspond t...

In order to minimize the cost of rapid prototyping, SEdit ooers the possibility to validate a technical system before its actual realization. For this purpose, the system has to be described logically by a set of axioms (system speciication). By means of deduction, it can be proven that the system will show the desired behaviour. For the sake of user acceptance and understandability, SEdit is a...

In this paper, we analyze a recent trend in software engineering (SE), test driven development, and discuss how it can be adapted to define self validating rule bases. We argue that test cases can be used to specify the semantics of rules, and that the presence of these test cases safeguards the life cycle of rules. We introduce an abstract conceptual framework, in the tradition of Tarski, that...

This paper describes a method for validating specifications written in the CCITT language SDL. The method has been implemented as part of an experimental validation system. With the experimental system we have been able to perform exhaustive analyses of systems with over 250 million reachable composite system states. The practicality of the tool for the analysis of substantial portions of AT&T'...