Advanced Design and Verification Environment for Cyber-physical System Engineering (ADVANCE)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: Alternative Paths to Components and Systems
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: United Kingdom,France,France,Germany,United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2011-7, 2011)
Start date: 2011-10-01
End date: 2014-11-30
Duration (months): 38.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3659361.0
EU funding (EUR): 2550000.0
Participants: 7
Project status: CLOSED

The overall objective of ADVANCE is the development of a unified tool-based framework for automated formal verification and simulation-based validation of cyber-physical systems. Unification will be achieved through the use of a common formal modelling language supported by methods and tools for simulation and formal verification. An integrated tool environment will provide support for construction, verification and simulation of models. The delivered methods and tools will overcome significant deficiencies in current practices in cyber-physical systems engineering that make verification and validation hugely costly and time consuming. The ADVANCE consortium consists of six strong and complementary partners representing a combination of leading European industrial players in systems engineering along with academic partners with internationally leading expertise in formal verification and simulation tools. Systerel and the Univs. of Düsseldorf and Southampton will lead the development of novel methods and tools while Alstom and Critical Software will apply these to the engineering of intelligent transport and energy systems. Selex ES, as the end user of the energy system development, will bring industrial and commercial experience to the exploitation of the methods and tools developed. We will exploit recent advances in technology for high-level formal modelling (Event-B & Rodin) with strong support for formal verification; The Rodin tool will be further strengthened and augmented with novel approaches to multi-simulation and testing. ADVANCE will reinforce European scientific excellence and technological leadership in the design and operation of large-scale complex systems, improve industrial competitiveness through strengthened capabilities in advanced embedded systems, in monitoring, control and optimisation of large-scale complex systems, in areas like energy, transport, and production, and in engineering of large-scale systems. In particular, the outcome of Case Study 1 will be to improve safety in the railway domain for dynamic trusted railway interlocking, and the outcome of Case Study 2 will be to have an impact on the efficiency of energy distribution in the emerging smart grid market, in which Selex ES has already a market presence. For the railway case study, an experienced safety and certification expert from the Alstom RAMS team will contribute to the identification of safety requirements in the formal model and to the assessment of the compliance of the ADVANCE process to certification requirements. For the smart grid case study, Selex ES are providing expert input into the formal modeling of Low Voltage Networks which will result in a smart grid solution which not only is energy efficient but can also avert transformer failure, thereby ensuring more reliable and cost-effective energy supply to meet future user demand.

Keywords: cyber-physical systems,verification,validation,formal methods,refinement,simulation,model-based testing,systems-of-systems,railway interlocking,smart grids.