Thesis projects at Scania are excellent ways of making contacts for your future working life. Many of our current employees started their career with a thesis project.
Background:
The automotive industry has witnessed a dramatic increase in software complexity, with modern vehicles relying heavily on code for critical functions. This shift has raised the importance of software safety and reliability, leading to the development of guidelines like MISRA-C and ISO-26262. For example, according to (EU) 2022/1426 which states that number of fatalities per operational hour should be no greater than 10^(-7) for automated driving systems (ADSs) to be introduced to the market. However, these standards, which are often expressed in natural language, can be ambiguous and challenging to verify consistently. Formal methods offer a rigorous, mathematical approach to software specification and verification, potentially addressing these challenges. Despite their promise, formal methods have historically faced barriers to industry adoption due to their complexity and resource requirements. Recent advancements in formal techniques and verification tools, coupled with the growing need for verifiable safety in automotive software, present a well-timed opportunity to bridge this gap. By formalizing guidelines such as MISRA-C and ISO-26262, we can potentially enhance their clarity, consistency, and verifiability, eventually contributing to the development of safer and more reliable automotive software systems.
Target:
Formalizing guidelines such as MISRA-C/C++, ISO-26262 in a formal language provides a higher level of trust in software verification for the automotive industry than current methods. This project aims to explore and develop techniques for translating these guidelines into formal specifications that can be formally verified. In particular, we are interested in researching how to systematically translate the often natural language rules of these guidelines into mathematical or logical formulations that can be used with formal verification tools. There are a number of interesting use cases for such formalized guidelines, including automated compliance checking, generating provably correct implementations from specifications, formal analysis of safety properties (such as bounds checking, state invariants, control flow integrity), and enabling stronger verification of automotive software components. The formalization process may also help identify ambiguities or inconsistencies in the original natural language guidelines, potentially leading to their improvement and refinement.
Example of assignments (but not limited to):
• Translating natural language from standards like MISRA-C and ISO-26262 into a mathematical language suitable for use in formal specifications.
• Incorporating translated formal specifications from standards into tools for formal verification.
• Investigation of validity and completeness of translated requirements from standards.
• Development of code metrics to assess how well standards are followed.
Education:
Education: MSc in Computer Science or similar, with some background in formal methods.
Contact persons:
Minal Suresh Patil, Senior Researcher, Scania, minal.patil@scania.com
Dilian Gurov, Professor, KTH, dilian@kth.se
Mattias Nyberg, Adj. prof, KTH / Research Lead, Scania, mattias.nyberg@scania.com
Number of students: 1-3
Time:20 weeks, full time 40 hours per week
Start: Jan 2025
Credits: 30hp
Application:
Enclose CV, personal letter and transcript of grades.
Application shall be registered in both: Thesis project application, and the "Apply"-button on this page
A background check might be conducted for this position. We are conducting interviews continuously and may close the recruitment earlier than the date specified.