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Madrid, 09/05/2016 – ENABLE-S³ (European Initiative to Enable Validation for Highly Automated Safe and Secure Systems) is industry-driven and aspires to substitute today’s cost-intensive verification & validation efforts by more advanced and efficient methods to pave the way for the commercialization of highly automated cyber physical systems (ACPS). Pure simulation cannot cover physics in detail due to its limitations in modelling and computation. Real-world tests are too expensive, too time consuming and potentially dangerous. Thus, ENABLE-S³ aims at developing an innovative solution capable of combining both worlds in an optimized manner.
ACPS represent disruptive technologies that are key to solve major societal challenges. These systems promise to significantly improve safety and efficiency, provide accessibility to all sectors of society (e.g. the elderly, rural areas), reduce emissions, and improve productivity by freeing humans from routine tasks. In this respect, ACPS are not only disruptive in a technical sense, but also in a social sense as we hand over part of our responsibility to the machine with all benefits but also the need to control the associated risks of the automation.
ACPS from different industry sectors have in common that they use complex sensing to gain an understanding of their operational environment in order to either support humans in complex, often safety critical control tasks or to even make decisions where the human user is no longer in the loop. This poses completely new challenges for the required functionality, quality level, and reliable operation of these systems because they have to perform their tasks without the fall back option to hand over control to the user in critical situations – as e.g. in today’s driver assistance systems. Testing all functions as well as partial malfunctions in all possible situations in very complex environments and under difficult environmental influences leads to a nearly infinite number of verification and validation (V&V) scenarios as well as astronomic V&V costs and duration. Moreover, these systems have by design many external interfaces which make them vulnerable to malicious attacks and manipulations.
The societal and commercial benefits of ACPS will only materialize if they provably operate at least as reliable, safe and secure as operated by human beings in their area of application. In order to ensure the required level of dependability, conventional real-world tests (i.e. on roads, sea, rails or with human beings in case of smart health robots) create unacceptable risks and cause excessive validation durations due to the vast number of situations to consider. This causes – as of today – unacceptable verification and validation costs preventing their commercialization.
The objective of ENABLE-S³ is to establish cost-efficient cross-domain virtual and semi-virtual V&V platforms and methods for ACPS. Advanced functional, safety and security test methods will be developed in order to significantly reduce the verification and validation time but preserve the validity of the tests for the requested high operation range. ENABLE-S³ aspires to substitute today’s physical validation and verification efforts by virtual testing and verification, coverage-oriented test selection methods and standardization.
The ENABLE-S³ consortium combines experts from six different domains with tool suppliers and academia in order to cope with the main testing challenges. The large consortium allows to build a good network of experts in the area of verification and validation of ACPS due to the good value chain coverage. The consortium has 71 Partners from 16 countries of European Union.
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ENABLE-S³ project is co-financed by ECSEL Joint Undertaking and Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Digital Agenda, within the ECSEL Call for Proposals 2015, under Grant Agreement number 692455.