About the project
Manufacturers of automated systems and the manufacturers of the components used in these systems have been allocating an enormous amount of time and effort in the past years developing and conducting research on automated systems. The effort spent has resulted in the availability of prototypes demonstrating new capabilities as well as the introduction of such systems to the market within different domains. Manufacturers of these systems need to make sure that the systems function in the intended way and according to specifications which is not a trivial task as system complexity rises dramatically the more integrated and interconnected these systems become with the addition of automated functionality and features to them.
With rising complexity, unknown emerging properties of the system may come to the surface making it necessary to conduct thorough verification and validation (V&V) of these systems. Through the V&V of automated systems, the manufacturers of these systems are able to ensure safe, secure and reliable systems for society to use since failures in highly automated systems can be catastrophic.
The high complexity of automated systems incurs an overhead on the V&V process making it time-consuming and costly. VALU3S aims to design, implement and evaluate state-of-the-art V&V methods and tools in order to reduce the time and cost needed to verify and validate automated systems with respect to safety, cybersecurity and privacy (SCP) requirements. This will ensure that European manufacturers of automated systems remain competitive and that they remain world leaders. To this end, a multi-domain framework is designed and evaluated with the aim to create a clear structure around the components and elements needed to conduct V&V process through identification and classification of evaluation methods, tools, environments and concepts that are needed to verify and validate automated systems with respect to SCP requirements.
In VALU3S, 12 use cases with specific safety, security and privacy requirements will be studied in detail. Several state-of-the-art V&V methods will be investigated and further enhanced in addition to implementing new methods aiming for reducing the time and cost needed to conduct V&V of automated systems. The V&V methods investigated are then used to design improved process workflows for V&V of automated systems. Several tools will be implemented supporting the improved processes which are evaluated by qualification and quantification of safety, security and privacy as well as other evaluation criteria using demonstrators. VALU3S will also influence the development of safety, security and privacy standards through an active participation in related standardisation groups. VALU3S will provide guidelines to the testing community including engineers and researchers on how the V&V of automated systems could be improved considering the cost, time and effort of conducting the tests.
VALU3S brings together a consortium with partners from 10 different countries, with a mix of industrial partners (24 partners) from automotive, agriculture, railway, healthcare, aerospace and industrial automation and robotics domains as well as leading research institutes (6 partners) and universities (10 partners) to reach the project goal.