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）的失效（包括软件与硬件相关故障）可能导致严重事故，对物理基础设施乃至人类安全造成威胁。因此，作为系统需求验证与确认的重要环节，必须开展大量仿真测试与现场试验以确保系统安全。然而，当前的仿真与现场测试实践（尤其是小型无人航空系统（sUAS）领域）存在即兴化倾向，缺乏系统化、结构化的测试流程。此外，当前缺少用于指导综合仿真与现场测试设计的标准化流程与方法论。这一测试流程的缺陷导致sUAS应用部署时面临以下问题：（a）在仿真环境中进行的测试因缺乏工具支持，未能充分捕捉真实世界的复杂性（如环境因素）；（b）由于缺乏定义需求与仿真测试关系的流程，仿真测试期间未能通过全面场景验证系统需求；（c）因仿真测试工件与安全分析工件之间缺失可追溯性，未能通过标准安全分析流程进行评估。针对上述问题，我们构建了面向CPS验证的初始框架，尤其聚焦sUAS与机器人应用场景。通过sUAS领域案例验证，我们证明了该框架的适用性。初步结果证实了框架的有效性。最后，我们提出研究路线图，阐明基于现有提案的未来研究目标。