Computer science colloquia: Elisabeth Nguyen
| Date/Time: | Thursday, 29 Apr 2010 at 10:00 am |
|---|---|
| Location: | 1126 Sweeney Hall |
| Phone: | 515-294-6516 |
| Channel: | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences |
| Categories: | Lectures |
| Actions: | Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder |
This talk describes a specific application of assurance cases to the problem of ensuring that a transition from a legacy system to its replacement will not compromise mission assurance objectives. The application in question was the transition of the Global Positioning System (GPS) to a new ground-control system. The transition, which took place over five days, required uninterrupted control of the GPS satellite constellation while control was transferred from a 1970s-era mainframe to a distributed architecture. We created an assurance case so that the procedural documentation we had could be restructured into a form amenable to analysis. The analysis concluded that there were no major hazards; this conclusion was validated by a successful transition.
Elisabeth Nguyen is an Engineering Specialist in the Software Systems Engineering Department at The Aerospace Corporation, which operates a Federally Funded Research and Development Center providing independent technical expertise to support government acquisition of satellite systems (including GPS). She is interested in software systems dependability, including formal methods, assurance cases and quantitative dependability analysis. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia in 2005.