The 2018 industrial challenge

[Sophie Quinton]

About the WATERS industrial challenge
The purpose of the WATERS industrial challenge is to share ideas, experiences and solutions to a concrete timing verification problem issued from real industrial case studies. It also aims at promoting discussions, closer interactions, cross fertilization of ideas and synergies across the breadth of the real-time research community, as well as attracting industrial practitioners from different domains having a specific interest in timing verification.

The 2018 industrial challenge
We are glad to announce that the 2018 challenge will be proposed by Emmanuel Ledinot from Dassault Aviation. An initial presentation of the challenge is given below.

The WATERS 2018 industrial challenge is entitled " Certifiable contract-based timing analysis of CPS" and based on a public domain use case under development ( https://github.com/AdaCore/RESSAC_Use_Case/). This use case, managed by the RESSAC project at IRT St Exupery (Toulouse, France) led by Airbus, was designed as an open research lab. to explore reformation of aeronautic certification. Such a reformation was initiated by the Federal Aviation Administration in the US by fall of 2015, and supported by world aeronautic industry. The use case is based on a small drone-like Cyber Physical System: hybrid multi-system mixing simple mechanics, hydraulics, electrical powering, flight control, mission management, fault tolerance, and distributed real-time computation. The use case is focused on model-based and contract-based refinement of hybrid systems, because they are anticipated as key enablers for future design assurance, in addition to model-based and contract-based software/hardware development. On the academic side, an attempt to carry out an end-to-end formal safety case has started and is intended to be a long term research challenge for the hybrid system community.

The WATERS 2018 challenge is a call for proposals to contribute the concepts, models, candidate technologies, and analyses of the RESSAC use case's middleware layer (named increment 4 in the documentation). 'Middleware layer' is an umbrella term to denote all the features related to the executive layers (RTOS, task scheduling, message scheduling), communication protocols (internal to the drone and with the ground station), and hard-real time timing analysis. Each team participating to the 2018 challenge is invited design the middleware layer, chose technological solutions, and then play the role of an applicant substantiating the correctness of its design to an Authority. Contributions are expected on timing-contract languages, suitable abstractions of the concrete technological solutions, compositionality and genericity of the correctness arguments.