New manufacturing technologies have made possible the integration of entire systems on a single chip. This new design paradigm, termed system-on-chip (SOC), together with its associated manufacturing problems, represents a real challenge for designers. SOC is also reshaping approaches to test and validation activities. These are beginning to migrate from the traditional register-transfer or gate levels of abstraction to the system level. Until now, test and validation have not been supported by system-level design tools so designers have lacked the infrastructure to exploit all the benefits stemming from the adoption of the system level of abstraction. Research efforts are already addressing this issue. This monograph provides a state-of-the-art overview of the current validation and test techniques by covering all aspects of the subject including: modeling of bugs and defects; stimulus generation for validation and test purposes (including timing errors; design for testability.

This book covers state-of-the art techniques for high-level modeling and validation of complex hardware/software systems, including those with multicore architectures. Readers will learn to avoid time-consuming and error-prone validation from the comprehensive coverage of system-level validation, including high-level modeling of designs and faults, automated generation of directed tests, and efficient validation methodology using directed tests and assertions. The methodologies described in this book will help designers to improve the quality of their validation, performing as much validation as possible in the early stages of the design, while reducing the overall validation effort and cost.

Systems' Verification Validation and Testing (VVT) are carried out throughout systems' lifetimes. Notably, quality-cost expended on performing VVT activities and correcting system defects consumes about half of the overall engineering cost. Verification, Validation and Testing of Engineered Systems provides a comprehensive compendium of VVT activities and corresponding VVT methods for implementation throughout the entire lifecycle of an engineered system. In addition, the book strives to alleviate the fundamental testing conundrum, namely: What should be tested? How should one test? When should one test? And, when should one stop testing? In other words, how should one select a VVT strategy and how it be optimized? The book is organized in three parts: The first part provides introductory material about systems and VVT concepts. This part presents a comprehensive explanation of the role of VVT in the process of engineered systems (Chapter-1). The second part describes 40 systems' development VVT activities (Chapter-2) and 27 systems' post-development activities (Chapter-3). Corresponding to these activities, this part also describes 17 non-testing systems' VVT methods (Chapter-4) and 33 testing systems' methods (Chapter-5). The third part of the book describes ways to model systems' quality cost, time and risk (Chapter-6), as well as ways to acquire quality data and optimize the VVT strategy in the face of funding, time and other resource limitations as well as different business objectives (Chapter-7). Finally, this part describes the methodology used to validate the quality model along with a case study describing a system's quality improvements (Chapter-8). Fundamentally, this book is written with two categories of audience in mind. The first category is composed of VVT practitioners, including Systems, Test, Production and Maintenance engineers as well as first and second line managers. The second category is composed of students and faculties of Systems, Electrical, Aerospace, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering schools. This book may be fully covered in two to three graduate level semesters; although parts of the book may be covered in one semester. University instructors will most likely use the book to provide engineering students with knowledge about VVT, as well as to give students an introduction to formal modeling and optimization of VVT strategy.

Effective software is essential to the success and safety of the Space Shuttle, including its crew and its payloads. The on-board software continually monitors and controls critical systems throughout a Space Shuttle flight. At NASA's request, the committee convened to review the agency's flight software development processes and to recommend a number of ways those processes could be improved. This book, the result of the committee's study, evaluates the safety, oversight, and management functions that are implemented currently in the Space Shuttle program to ensure that the software is of the highest quality possible. Numerous recommendations are made regarding safety and management procedures, and a rationale is offered for continuing the Independent Verification and Validation effort that was instituted after the Challenger Accident.

Advanced approaches to software engineering and design are capable of solving complex computational problems and achieving standards of performance that were unheard of only decades ago. Handbook of Research on Emerging Advancements and Technologies in Software Engineering presents a comprehensive investigation of the most recent discoveries in software engineering research and practice, with studies in software design, development, implementation, testing, analysis, and evolution. Software designers, architects, and technologists, as well as students and educators, will find this book to be a vital and in-depth examination of the latest notable developments within the software engineering community.

This book constitutes the refereed joint proceedings of eight European workshops on the Theory and Applications of Evolutionary Computation, EvoWorkshops 2008, held in Naples, Italy, in March 2008 within the scope of the EvoStar 2008 event. The 57 revised full papers and 18 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 133 submissions. In accordance with the eight workshops covered, the papers are organized in topical sections on application of nature-inspired techniques to telecommunication networks and other connected systems, evolutionary computation in finance and economics, bio-inspired heuristics for design automation, evolutionary computation in image analysis and signal processing, evolutionary and biologically inspired music, sound, art and design, bio-inspired algorithms for continuous parameter optimization, evolutionary algorithms in stochastic and dynamic environments, theory and applications of evolutionary computation, and on evolutionary computation in transportation and logistics.

Software-Hardware Integration in Automotive Product Development brings together a must-read set of technical papers on one the most talked-about subjects among industry experts The carefully selected content of this book demonstrates how leading companies, universities, and organizations have developed methodologies, tools, and technologies to integrate, verify, and validate hardware and software systems. The automotive industry is no different, with the future of its product development lying in the timely integration of these chiefly electronic and mechanical systems. The integration activities cross both product type and engineering discipline boundaries to include chip-, embedded board-, and network/vehicle-level systems. Integration, verification, and validation of each of these three domains are examined in depth, attesting to the difficulties of this phase of the automotive hardware and software system life cycle. The current state of the art is to integrate, verify, validate, and test automotive hardware and software with a complement of physical hardware and virtual software prototyping tools. The growth of sophisticated software tools, sometimes combined with hardware-in-the-loop devices, has allowed the automotive industry to meet shrinking time-to-market, decreasing costs, and increasing safety demands. It is also why most of the papers in this book focus on virtual systems, prototypes, and models to emulate and simulate both hardware and software. Further, such tools and techniques are the way that hardware and software systems can be “co-verified” and tested in a concurrent fashion. The goal of this compilation of expert articles is to reveal the similarities and differences between the integration, verification, and validation (IVV) of hardware and software at the chip, board, and network levels. This comparative study will reveal the common IVV thread among the different, but ultimately related, implementations of hardware and software systems. In so doing, it supports the larger systems engineering approach for the vertically integrated automobile—namely, that of model-driven development.