Verification and Validation in Cyber Physical Systems: Research Challenges and a Way Forward

It is widely held that debugging cyber-physical systems (CPS) is challenging; to date, empirical studies investigating research challenges in CPS verification and validation have not been done. As a result, the exact challenges facing CPS developers in the real world remain at best unquantified and at worst unknown, and the research directions the community should undertake are not clearly identified. In this paper, we review our recent empirical study of real-world CPS developers. This position paper then uses the findings from this study to highlight the discovered key challenges and to present a research trajectory to address these challenges.