Automated specification and verification of functional safety in heavy-vehicles: The VeriSpec approach

ISO 26262 is the new standard for automotive functional safety. This standard identifies major process steps across a large number of system stages as well as safety-related artifacts required as input and output of these steps. The VeriSpec project intends to identify the main challenges for the adoption of ISO 26262 by the heavy-vehicle industry and to provide useful and industrially relevant “components” (methods, tools etc.) required by the standard. The project work targets two main research goals: (i) requirement formalization support, including a usable front-end for specifying requirements by using patterns, and (ii) formal analysis of realizations in form of architectural models at various levels of abstraction, by model-checking the formal representations of the latter. In this paper, we present the current challenges facing industry and justifying VeriSpec, together with a preliminary roadmap for the research.