Towards Formal Fault Injection for Safety Assessment of Automated Systems

Ashfaq Farooqui
(Dependable Transport Systems, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Borås, Sweden)
Behrooz Sangchoolie
(Dependable Transport Systems, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Borås, Sweden)

Reasoning about safety, security, and other dependability attributes of autonomous systems is a challenge that needs to be addressed before the adoption of such systems in day-to-day life. Formal methods is a class of methods that mathematically reason about a system's behavior. Thus, a correctness proof is sufficient to conclude the system's dependability. However, these methods are usually applied to abstract models of the system, which might not fully represent the actual system. Fault injection, on the other hand, is a testing method to evaluate the dependability of systems. However, the amount of testing required to evaluate the system is rather large and often a problem. This vision paper introduces formal fault injection, a fusion of these two techniques throughout the development lifecycle to enhance the dependability of autonomous systems. We advocate for a more cohesive approach by identifying five areas of mutual support between formal methods and fault injection. By forging stronger ties between the two fields, we pave the way for developing safe and dependable autonomous systems. This paper delves into the integration's potential and outlines future research avenues, addressing open challenges along the way.

In Marie Farrell, Matt Luckcuck, Mario Gleirscher and Maike Schwammberger: Proceedings Fifth International Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS 2023), Leiden, The Netherlands, 15th and 16th of November 2023, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 395, pp. 153–161.
Published: 15th November 2023.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.395.11 bibtex PDF
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