Workshop on Formal Methods for Aerospace (FMA)

Bujorianu, M.L. and Fisher, M. (2009) Workshop on Formal Methods for Aerospace (FMA). [MIMS Preprint]

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Abstract

The coexistence of multiple disciplinary perspectives on the same class of critical applications (aerospace) and investigation (formal) methods leads naturally to the opportunity to define multidisciplinary approaches. Thus, work in this area will likely underline the importance of some research problems from aerospace to the formal methods community, and promote new formal techniques combining the principles of artificial intelligence and control engineering. The source of new problems for formal methods comes from the great diversity of aerospace systems. These can be satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), terrestrial or other kinds of flying robots. These systems can be involved in complex activities such as space exploration, telecommunication support, fire detection, geo-mapping, weather prognoses, geo-rectification, search and rescue, naval traffic surveillance, tracking high value targets. From these applications, new research problems appear: autonomy, collective behaviour, information fusion, cognitive skills, coordination, flocking, etc. In addition, new concepts must be formalised: digital pheromones, swarms, system of systems of robots, sensing, physical actuation, and so on. Aerospace systems are not only safety critical, but also mission critical and have very high performance requirements. For example, there is no safety issue regarding a planetary rover, but the system performance must justify the great cost of deploying it. Consequently, aerospace enriches traditional formal methods topics with new (or, at least, rarely investigated) research issues. Formal methods could greatly benefit from integration with approaches from other disciplines, and many such opportunities are now appearing. A good example is the problem of coordination for platoons of UAVs or satellites, which have been successfully, tackled using various techniques from control engineering and numerical tools from dynamic programming. In addition, there exist an abundance of examples artificial intelligence techniques in aerospace (target tracking, rover planning, multi-agent technologies and so on). The implementation of these methods could benefit from formal development. From the cross-fertilization of related multidisciplinary approaches, we expect more robust, safe and mechanizable development and verification methods for aerospace systems.

Item Type:	MIMS Preprint
Uncontrolled Keywords:	formal methods, aerospace applications, Cicada
Subjects:	MSC 2010, the AMS's Mathematics Subject Classification > 68 Computer science
Depositing User:	Dr. Manuela Luminita BUJORIANU
Date Deposited:	13 Jun 2010
Last Modified:	08 Nov 2017 18:18
URI:	https://eprints.maths.manchester.ac.uk/id/eprint/1482

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