SANITAS: Enabling Safer Systems by a new Collaborative Verification Methodology across the Value Chain

The mastering of highly automated and complex manufacturing is what makes Germany a unique industrial site being still competitive even in comparison to low-wage countries. Prerequisite to stay in this leading position are powerful electronic automation systems driven by enhanced virtual planning tools such as the so called Digital Factory. The success strongly depends on having a seamless verification methodology in place to ensure that such systems fulfill safety-critical properties. The proposed research project SANITAS targets the development and exploration of a new system verification methodology for the design of highly reliable next generation applications and products. SANITAS integrates several layers of the product development chain from the layer of micro- and nanoelectronic components up to the layer of final products into a holistic verification strategy. This, for the first time, provides a seamless verification process along the whole development chain which is capable of capturing the effects of micro-/nanoelectronic components and embedded software – the key drivers for building safe, reliable, and highly energy efficient products – at an early stage of the overall development process. The technical goals of SANITAS include increasing the verification efficiency and effectiveness by moving to a higher level of model abstraction in conjunction with developing powerful verification mechanisms acting on that level. These mechanisms are complemented by techniques which enable a seamless integration into requirements management at the product level. Furthermore, SANITAS aims at developing a methodology which allows for a flexible generation of high level verification models or environments which can be efficiently used for an early validation of the overall system behavior. Hence, SANITAS will be able to provide for the first time a seamless methodology that takes a holistic view of the creation of highly reliable products covering multiple layers of the product development chain and that opens the door for taking the interactions and cross-correlations between those layers into account. Within SANITAS the domain of industry automation – one of the most important German technology domains – is used as a showcase application. The Siemens sector Industry, the leading provider of industrial automation technology and driver of the Digital Factory, will utilize the results of SANITAS for speeding up the development of automation systems. Furthermore, Siemens will broaden its Digital Factory solutions by including virtual models of electronic devices into the analysis and planning of manufacturing systems. Siemens cooperates with partners of other important German technology domains, including automotive, mobile communications, high-performance computing, and multimedia. These partners ensure that the results of this project can be widely applied in the electronics-based industry within Germany.

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