Trust by design -- in praise of modularization: a case study
For designers of collective adaptive systems, this work offers conceptual and verification measures to enhance trust, though it is an early-stage proposal without concrete results.
The paper proposes three measures to ensure trustworthiness in collective adaptive systems: locally confined runs, verification techniques exploiting such runs, and compositional property reasoning. A case study demonstrates the benefits of modularization, with future work planned for a full theory.
Ensuring that collective adaptive systems remain safe, reliable, and trustworthy requires measures that transcend so far established formal methods, and in particular established verification techniques. In this contribution, we suggest three such measures: (1) conceptual means: runs with locally confined cause and effect of events, (2) temporal logic like verification techniques that respect and exploit such runs, (3) composing system properties from properties of components. This contribution presents a case study which particularly focuses on the benefits of modularization for achieving trust by design. Further work will develop a full-fledged theory for the presented ideas.