Thanks to the advances in information technology, modern industrial systems are becoming increasingly intelligent and autonomous; thus their requirements for, e.g., correctness, availability, traceability and reliability, are also increasing. Monitoring, analysis and diagnosis of such industrial systems became pivotal and fueled the development of virtualization and simulation solutions such as digital twins. In a nutshell, digital twins are virtual representations of actual systems or processes that serve as real-time digital counterparts for, e.g., prediction, analysis, testing, and simulation. Developing digital twins is a complex process. On the one hand, it includes developing digital twins at different levels of abstraction of the system to allow one to focus on different relevant aspects (e.g, behavioural, logical, physical). On the other hand, it must ensure the correctness of digital twins with respect to the system specifications and the respective level of abstraction, and the federation enabling the communication between digital twins conceived as exchange and resume of models. This project aims to develop a model-based framework addressing the above-mentioned challenges by i) automating the creation of digital twins for the simulation, monitoring and testing of functional and non-functional properties ii) continuous validating digital twins to meet the required properties and iii) developing a multidomain and automated digital twin toolchain for the verification and validation of complex industrial systems based on digital twins. We foresee that this project will positively impact the efficiency of such systems by reducing their time to value and by increasing their final quality.

Manufacturers of automated systems and the manufacturers of the components used in these systems have been allocating an enormous amount of time and effort in the past years developing and conducting research on automated systems. The effort spent has resulted in the availability of prototypes demonstrating new capabilities as well as the introduction of such systems to the market within different domains. Manufacturers of these systems need to make sure that the systems function in the intended way and according to specifications which is not a trivial task as system complexity rises dramatically the more integrated and interconnected these systems become with the addition of automated functionality and features to them. With rising complexity, unknown emerging properties of the system may come to the surface making it necessary to conduct thorough verification and validation (V&V) of these systems. VALU3S aims to design, implement and evaluate state-of-the-art V&V methods and tools in order to reduce the time and cost needed to verify and validate automated systems with respect to safety, cybersecurity and privacy (SCP) requirements. This will ensure that European manufacturers of automated systems remain competitive and that they remain world leaders. To this end, a multi-domain framework is designed and evaluated with the aim to create a clear structure around the components and elements needed to conduct V&V process through identification and classification of evaluation methods, tools, environments and concepts that are needed to verify and validate automated systems with respect to SCP requirements. The implemented V&V methods as well as improved process workflows and tools will also be evaluated in the project using a comprehensive set of demonstrators built from 13 use cases with specific SCP requirements from 6 domains of automotive, industrial robotics, agriculture, Aerospace, railway and health.