Simulation verification and validation by dynamic policy enforcement

This paper presents a new verification and validation (V&V) technique for simulation using dynamic policy enforcement. Constraints are formally specified as policies, and they will be used to check whether simulation satisfies these policies at runtime. This paper also proposes a development framework where policies are developed along with system development and V&V. Once policies are extracted from requirements and specified in a policy specification language, the rest of the development work is automatically performed by the tools in the framework. Both security requirements and functional requirements can be specified as policies and dynamically enforced during the simulation. An automated tool is available for policy specification and enforcement, and it is fully integrated with the simulation infrastructure. This paper also presents a sample system that is modeled and simulated, and policies are used to verify and validate the system model. The paper also discusses the overhead imposed to perform this kind of automated policy-based V&V compared to the hard-coded implementation of the same approach.