Affiliations: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD,
USA | SAIC, Advanced Concepts Business Unit, McLean, VA,
USA | University of Ulster, School of Computing and
Mathematics, Jordanstown, Northern Ireland
Abstract: The explosion of capabilities and new products within the sphere of
information technology (IT) has fostered widespread, overly optimistic opinions
regarding the industry, based on common but unjustified assumptions of quality
and correctness of software. NASA faces this dilemma as it envisages advanced
mission concepts that involve large swarms of small spacecraft that will engage
cooperatively to achieve science goals. Such missions involve levels of
complexity that beg for new methods for system development far beyond
today's methods, which are inadequate for ensuring correct behavior of
large numbers of interacting intelligent mission elements. New system
development techniques recently devised through NASA-led research will offer
innovative approaches to achieving correctness in complex system development,
including autonomous swarm missions that exhibit emergent behavior, as well as
general software products created by the software Industry.
Keywords: system development, correctness, autonomous and autonomic systems, formal methods
