Failures in safety-critical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), both software and hardware-related, can lead to severe incidents impacting physical infrastructure or even harming humans. As a result, extensive simulations and field tests need to be conducted, as part of the verification and validation of system requirements, to ensure system safety. However, current simulation and field testing practices, particularly in the domain of small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS), are ad-hoc and lack a thorough, structured testing process. Furthermore, there is a dearth of standard processes and methodologies to inform the design of comprehensive simulation and field tests. This gap in the testing process leads to the deployment of sUAS applications that are: (a) tested in simulation environments which do not adequately capture the real-world complexity, such as environmental factors, due to a lack of tool support; (b) not subjected to a comprehensive range of scenarios during simulation testing to validate the system requirements, due to the absence of a process defining the relationship between requirements and simulation tests; and (c) not analyzed through standard safety analysis processes, because of missing traceability between simulation testing artifacts and safety analysis artifacts. To address these issues, we have developed an initial framework for validating CPS, specifically focusing on sUAS and robotic applications. We demonstrate the suitability of our framework by applying it to an example from the sUAS domain. Our preliminary results confirm the applicability of our framework. We conclude with a research roadmap to outline our next research goals along with our current proposal.

翻译：安全关键型信息物理系统（CPS）的故障（包括软件和硬件相关故障）可能导致严重后果，如影响物理基础设施甚至危害人类。因此，作为系统需求验证与确认的一部分，需要进行大量仿真和现场测试以确保系统安全。然而，当前的仿真与现场测试实践（尤其是在小型无人航空系统（sUAS）领域）仍缺乏系统化的结构化测试流程。此外，针对综合性仿真和现场测试的设计，尚缺乏标准流程与方法论指导。这一测试流程的缺失导致sUAS应用部署存在以下问题：（a）由于缺乏工具支持，仿真环境未能充分捕获现实世界的复杂性（如环境因素）；（b）由于缺乏定义需求与仿真测试之间关系的流程，仿真测试未能覆盖足够多的场景来验证系统需求；（c）由于仿真测试工件与安全分析工件之间缺乏可追溯性，未能通过标准安全分析流程进行系统分析。为解决这些问题，我们开发了一个针对CPS的初步验证框架，重点聚焦于sUAS与机器人应用。通过sUAS领域的一个实例，我们展示了该框架的适用性。初步结果证实了其有效性。最后，我们结合当前提案提出研究路线图，以明确后续研究目标。