WEAG THALES JP11.20 (REVVA) Results and Perspectives

Within the WEAG THALES Joint Program 11.20 "Common Framework for Verification, Validation, and Accreditation of Simulations" (nicknamed "REVVA") between Denmark, France, Italy, Sweden, and The Nether-lands, a new customer-based and product-oriented VV&A methodology was developed. It includes: (1) The REVVA Generic Process, a stand-alone VV&A process, which can be easily linked to numerous types of model development processes; (2) The concepts of Target of Acceptance (ToA) and Target of Verification and Validation (ToVV), which put a strong emphasis on V&V requirements definition and traceability from the individual Items of Evidence acquired during V&V implementation up to the intended purpose of model use; (3) The explicit distinction between the proper-ties "correctness" and "validity", which are inherent to a simulation model on the one hand, and the processes of "verification" and "validation" to reveal them on the other hand; (4) Hooks for the integration of methods for estimation of uncertainty introduced by the current inability to prove neither correctness nor validity; (5) A role model, which clearly distinguishes technical and managerial roles and parties from which the actors may come.
The follow-on project “REVVA2” shall formalize these former results and its own methodological basis. REVVA2 must also show its complementarities with other approaches such as the International Test Operations Procedure on V&V (WGE7.2) and the combined effort on HLA Federation VV&A by the NATO MSG019/TG016 and the SISO VV&A PDG. The ultimate objective of REVVA2 is the production of a set of documents that have to satisfy two kinds of goals: they have to be written in a style suitable for their submission to international standardization organizations, and need to be immediately applicable by VV&A practitioners. This paper, based on the Spring 05 SIW paper 041, outlines the results achieved by the first study and motivates future research and standardization directions.