Validation within safety critical systems engineering from a computational semiotics point of view

Software controlled Safety Critical Systems are increasing in importance in all areas of application. Combining efficient agile development processes with powerful but complex modeling and formal methods imposes grand challenges on software designing organizations. Especially the semiotic dimension which relates stakeholders and engineers in an engineering process is evoking such challenges. Focusing on these processes as basis for domain modeling and as point of reference for validation the authors outline a simulation based approach to overcome the semantic gap. But they know, that this still can only be a preparatory step for much more detailed semiotic analyses.