Project name: Aquavit
Advancing Qualitative Analysis for Verification, Interaction analysis and Testing
Start date: April 1996 Finish date: March 1999
Funding
EPSRC Grant £215,704
Staff
Myra Wilson, Chris Price, Neal Snooke
Collaborating organisations
Jaguar Cars Limited Ford Motor Company Limited Viewlogic Systems Limited Integral Solutions Limited
Objectives
The aim of the project is to improve the applicability of qualitative reasoning to the automation of electrical design analysis tasks. The project will investigate the automated use of modelling information across the lifecycle of an electrical product, and provide guidelines for what information should be provided and how it should be used. It will enable automated reasoning about larger systems than has previously been possible. In order to identify the information needed for automating design analysis, the project will produce practical tools providing automated assistance for electrical engineers in performing several design verification techniques. A major issue in design analysis is that important information is lost when reasoning about subsystems in isolation. For this reason, the project will also develop further the modelling techniques on which such automated assistance is based, in order to enable reasoning about the interactions between multiple systems. The main objectives of the project are:
- Increasing the maximum size of systems that can be qualitatively modelled.
- Improving qualitative modelling capabilities.
- Widening the range of design analysis tasks for which automated help can be provided.
- Investigating the implications of making qualitative models capable of being used in a range of different analysis tasks.