Evaluation of Formal IDEs for Human-Machine Interface Design and Analysis: The Case of CIRCUS and PVSio-web
This work addresses the need for evaluating formal IDEs to improve interface safety in critical systems, but it is incremental as it focuses on comparing existing tools.
The paper compares two formal integrated development environments (IDEs), CIRCUS and PVSio-web, for designing and analyzing human-machine interfaces in critical systems like avionics and medical devices, finding that they offer distinct approaches to ensuring safe usability.
Critical human-machine interfaces are present in many systems including avionics systems and medical devices. Use error is a concern in these systems both in terms of hardware panels and input devices, and the software that drives the interfaces. Guaranteeing safe usability, in terms of buttons, knobs and displays is now a key element in the overall safety of the system. New integrated development environments (IDEs) based on formal methods technologies have been developed by the research community to support the design and analysis of high-confidence human-machine interfaces. To date, little work has focused on the comparison of these particular types of formal IDEs. This paper compares and evaluates two state-of-the-art toolkits: CIRCUS, a model-based development and analysis tool based on Petri net extensions, and PVSio-web, a prototyping toolkit based on the PVS theorem proving system.