Evaluating verification awareness as a method for assessing adaptation risk

Self-integration requires a system to be self-aware and self-protecting of its functionality and communication processes to mitigate interference in accomplishing its goals. Incorporating self-protection into a framework for reasoning about compliance with critical requirements is a major challenge when the system’s operational environment may have uncertainties resulting in runtime changes. The reasoning should be over a range of impacts and tradeoffs in order for the system to immediately address an issue, even if only partially or imperfectly. Assuming that critical requirements can be formally specified and embedded as part of system self-awareness, runtime verification often involves extensive on-board resources and state explosion, with minimal explanation of results. Model-checking partially mitigates runtime verification issues by abstracting the system operations and architecture. However, validating the consistency of a model given a runtime change is generally performed external to the system and translated back to the operational environment, which can be inefficient.