The 21st Century Engineering Consortium

Abstract

The goal of high assurance design is to correctly design, implement and verify an information processing system, from the component level to the system level. We are unable to build high assurance systems today because of our inability to cover the entire design process from specification to implementation with a high degree of certainty that errors or misinterpretations of the specification have not been introduced into the final product. While tremendous amounts of simulation and testing may produce an implementation that functions correctly for the test data, these systems often fail in the operational world. The US Air Force's Rome Laboratory and DARPA's Information Technology Office, (ITO), is establishing the 21st Century Engineering Consortium. The reason for establishing the consortium is to develop the engineering capability necessary to build highly assured systems. In short, Rome Laboratory and DARPA's ITO would like to see a larger number of students trained in engineering based upon formal methods, e.g. hardware verification (VHDL models), software verification (Ada, C, C++ code), requirements/specification analysis, as well as applying this technology to other problem domains.