The following technical report is available from http://aib.informatik.rwth-aachen.de:
Trustworthy Spacecraft Design Using Formal Methods Viet Yen Nguyen AIB 2012-17
Model-based system-software co-engineering is a natural evolution towards meeting the high demands of upcoming deep-space and satellite constellation missions. It advocates better abstractions to cope with the increasing spacecraft complexity, and opens the door for a wide range of formal methods, benefiting from the mathematical rigour and precision they bring. This dissertation provides for both: we applied and evaluated state of the art modelling and analysis techniques based on formal methods to spacecraft engineering, and we developed novel theory that tackle issues encountered in industrial practice.
In particular, we formalised a modelling language by the aviation and automotive industry, namely the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL). We show in this dissertation how we rooted it into the theories on discrete, real-timed and hybrid automata, various Markov models and temporal and probabilistic logics. This foundation enabled us to develop a comprehensive analysis toolset with model checkers being the cornerstone. It provides a wide range of analyses in an algorithmic fashion rather than the labour-intensive methods currently employed by the space industry. It can generate simulations, fault trees, failure modes and effects tables, performability curves, diagnosability artefacts and affirmations of correctness exhaustively. Our work has been subjected to extensive evaluation. At the European Space Agency, we applied it to a satellite design of one of the agency's ongoing missions. This dissertation reports on this case study. The case is currently the largest formal methods study of a satellite architecture reported in literature.
The sheer size and complexity of the satellite case study indicated several theoretical problems. To this end, we developed a reasoning theory based on Craig interpolants, that generates compositional abstractions from the model. It helps to understand large models, like the satellite case, more effectively. We furthermore studied the use of Krylov methods for improving the numerical stability of analysing a notorious class of Markov chains, namely, stiff Markov chains. They occur naturally in space systems where failure rates have large disparities. Our controlled experiments show that Krylov methods are superior in such cases.