Atalanta Explores Software Understanding for Complex Missile Defense Systems
As software assumes greater responsibility within defense and other mission-critical systems, determining whether increasingly complex systems will behave as intended has become an important engineering and assurance challenge.
Atalanta is exploring that challenge through Software Understanding, an approach centered on using mathematical methods to establish stronger guarantees about the behavior of software-controlled systems.
As part of the Atalanta Assembly, held alongside the U.N. General Assembly High-Level Debate, the company presented a virtual exhibit examining Software Understanding in the context of one of the most consequential applications of complex technology: missile defense.
The exhibit highlights Argo, Atalanta's technology for applying formal methods and mathematical reasoning to complex systems. In the missile-defense scenario, the objective is to enable stakeholders involved in designing and developing the system to reason more rigorously about whether its components and decision-making processes will perform as intended.
The problem is particularly relevant to systems-of-systems engineering. Modern defense capabilities can depend on combinations of sensors, communications networks, software, decision-support systems, command structures, and physical platforms developed and operated by different organizations. Assurance therefore requires understanding not only individual components, but also how those components interact as part of a larger mission.
Atalanta describes its broader approach as addressing a “software understanding gap” created as critical systems become more complex and interdependent than traditional engineering and analysis techniques can easily accommodate.
The Assembly exhibit provides an example of how advances in formal methods and AI-assisted reasoning may be applied to the verification and assurance of high-consequence systems in which failures or unexpected interactions can have significant consequences.
Source: Atalanta Assembly – The Age of Software Understanding
Original Exhibit: https://atalantaassembly.com/exhibit.html