Design for validation: An approach to systems validation

Every complex system built is validated in some manner. Computer validation begins with review of the system design. As systems became too complicated for one person to review, validation began to rely on the application of adhoc methods by many individuals. As the cost of the changes mounted and the expense of failure increased, more organized procedures became essential. Attempts at devising and carrying out those procedures showed that validation is indeed a difficult technical problem. The successful transformation of the validation process into a systematic series of formally sound, integrated steps is necessary if the liability inherent in the future digita-system-based avionic and space systems is to be minimized. A suggested framework and timetable for the transformtion are presented. Basic working definitions of two pivotal ideas (validation and system life-cyle) are provided and show how the two concepts interact. Many examples are given of past and present validation activities by NASA and others. A conceptual framework is presented for the validation process. Finally, important areas are listed for ongoing development of the validation process at NASA Langley Research Center

Planetary rover technology development requirements

Planetary surface (including lunar) mobility and sampling capability is required to support proposed future National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) solar system exploration missions. The NASA Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology (OAST) is addressing some of these technology needs in its base research and development program, the Civil Space Technology Initiative (CSTI) and a new technology initiative entitled Pathfinder. The Pathfinder Planetary Rover (PPR) and Sample Acquisition, Analysis and Preservation (SAAP) programs will develop and validate the technologies needed to enable both robotic and piloted rovers on various planetary surfaces. The technology requirements for a planetary roving vehicle and the development plans of the PPR and SAAP programs are discussed

Simulation verification techniques study

Results are summarized of the simulation verification techniques study which consisted of two tasks: to develop techniques for simulator hardware checkout and to develop techniques for simulation performance verification (validation). The hardware verification task involved definition of simulation hardware (hardware units and integrated simulator configurations), survey of current hardware self-test techniques, and definition of hardware and software techniques for checkout of simulator subsystems. The performance verification task included definition of simulation performance parameters (and critical performance parameters), definition of methods for establishing standards of performance (sources of reference data or validation), and definition of methods for validating performance. Both major tasks included definition of verification software and assessment of verification data base impact. An annotated bibliography of all documents generated during this study is provided

The F-18 systems research aircraft facility

To help ensure that new aerospace initiatives rapidly transition to competitive U.S. technologies, NASA Dryden Flight Research Facility has dedicated a systems research aircraft facility. The primary goal is to accelerate the transition of new aerospace technologies to commercial, military, and space vehicles. Key technologies include more-electric aircraft concepts, fly-by-light systems, flush airdata systems, and advanced computer architectures. Future aircraft that will benefit are the high-speed civil transport and the National AeroSpace Plane. This paper describes the systems research aircraft flight research vehicle and outlines near-term programs

Ontology Population via NLP Techniques in Risk Management

In this paper we propose an NLP-based method for Ontology Population from texts and apply it to semi automatic instantiate a Generic Knowledge Base (Generic Domain Ontology) in the risk management domain. The approach is semi-automatic and uses a domain expert intervention for validation. The proposed approach relies on a set of Instances Recognition Rules based on syntactic structures, and on the predicative power of verbs in the instantiation process. It is not domain dependent since it heavily relies on linguistic knowledge. A description of an experiment performed on a part of the ontology of the PRIMA project (supported by the European community) is given. A first validation of the method is done by populating this ontology with Chemical Fact Sheets from Environmental Protection Agency . The results of this experiment complete the paper and support the hypothesis that relying on the predicative power of verbs in the instantiation process improves the performance.Information Extraction, Instance Recognition Rules, Ontology Population, Risk Management, Semantic Analysis