Verification and Validation of Physical Plant Models

Verification and validation is an important step in the system engineering process. Although it is a natural part of the design process, for both the physical components as well as controller hardware, it is less often considered as part of the model development process. However, companies are increasingly relying on physical models to make important business decisions. For this reason, we focus our attention in this paper on various aspects of the verification and validation processes used for physical models to ensure a rational basis for such decisions.

A key element of this work will be to use structural, logical and physical information captured in the models to help automate the process and ensure quality. The goal of this effort is to provide verification tools that require minimal user effort. Although the ideas in this paper will be presented within a conceptual framework that is generally applicable to a variety of modeling platforms, the paper will also discuss examples and tools built around the Modelica1 modeling language[1] to provide concrete demonstrations of these concepts.