Research On Verification, Validation And Assessment Techniques In The Early Phases Of Communication Network Development

Underwater acoustic communication is considered to be a major method to conductunderwater communications. With the development of underwater acoustic techniques,building a3-Dimention communication network is the tendency of the researches of this field.Since the underwater environment is quite complicated, completing an underwatercommunication network costs a lot; and its reliability, accuracy, safety, security and otherissues has a direct effect on the success of underwater communication.If the assessment of the functions and performance start after the completion of thecommunication network, a huge number of difficult and complex experiments must beconducted; additionally, to fix defects at this stage will be costly. In this case, if verificationand validation activities can be done before the operation of the network, the quality of thenetwork can be improved and the cost will be significantly reduced.However, since the limitation of the stage of underwater communication network relatedresearches in China, it is not the proper timing to apply advanced verification and validationtechniques to underwater acoustic communication network currently. An alternative is to usethose techniques on other similar communication network (e.g. the air traffic managementcommunication system that is selected to be the research object of this research), study andimprove the techniques, then apply the verification and validation measures on underwateracoustic communication network in the future.In this thesis, semi-formal verification and validation techniques are introduced, and thefocus is the two selected methods: fault tree analysis and Petri net based method. Also, theobject of this research, i.e. the HLA Gateway between AvationSimNet (ASN) andRealTimeDistributedSimulation (RTDS), is also illustrated. In order to conduct theverification and validation activities in the early phases (e.g. requirement and design phases)of the system, the requirement and design documents of the system has been studied, andused as the basis of the modeling.Then the logic and process of modeling are explained, after finishing building themodels, the analysis and simulations of the system have been conducted. Additionally, thequalitative and quantitative assessment of the system has been provided, together withdynamic simulations.The last part includes several mitigation methods to improve the safety and security ofthe system, and the possible usage of the verification and validation methods on actual underwater acoustic communication networks.