The objective of this research is to elicit the swarming power to solve the very difficult problem of design validation. This is a high-risk, high pay-off investigation on an approach that has not been done in the past. Individual knowledge acquired during the search is extracted to benefit collective effort. This is enabled via cultivation of knowledge exchange, accumulation, and utilization. The intelligent partitioning and grouping of the state variables allows for the construction of many effective abstract navigation tracks in large designs. This is a key breakthrough as the mined tracks naturally provide multiple valuable abstractions of the design upon which collective and diverse effort can be conducted. The development of new theories and algorithms will be an original contribution that will allow for transformative understanding of semi-formal verification and state space exploration, all in a rigorous framework.
The theories and practice that will result from this work will not only enable us for a deeper understanding of collective effort, it will shed light on other intractable problems as well, from closely related research areas such as manufacturing test to artificial intelligence.
This project will directly promote the education of the involved students. In regard to outreach to under-represented students, the PI currently advises multiple women Ph.D. students (under-represented in engineering), and this project will continue to encourage aspiring female students to participate in the research endeavor. In addition, the PI will actively recruit summer minority interns from programs within Virginia Tech to take part in this project.
