Towards making dependability visual - Combining model-based design and virtual realities

Dependability is often a very abstract concept. The reason is that dependability implications shall be very rare and are often not even wanted to happen during testing. In particular for software-intensive systems, it is very hard to find correct causal relationships/minimal cut sets. Modern model-based approaches help here by computing for example minimal cut sets automatically. However, these methods always rely on a correct model of the environment. In addition, the results are often not traceable or understandable for humans. Therefore, we suggest combining model-based analysis for deriving safety properties with virtual realities for ensuring model validity and trace-ability of results