UIT2206 Essay Proposal Liu Zenan A0077897B

Formal Methods in Airport Security

Airport security is the key to ensure passenger safety by preventing weapons and other dangerous
objects from being brought on-board an airplane. One specic area of interest for airport security is
to study how formal methods such as models and logic can be applied to the threat evaluation
process that is current in execution at all airports worldwide. In practice, airport security is
regulated by several international standards written and enforced by certication authorities.
Currently, all international standards are natural language documents describing the rules of airport
security and no real formal methods are applied to these rules in the evaluations of airport security
threats. There are, however, existing attempts to model airport security systems using formal
methods, such as the EDEMOI project (Ledru, Yves, et al., 2006), which aims to model and
validate the models of the international standards supported by formal method tools such as proof,
test and animation tools.
Upon closer scrutiny, airport security regulations involves stakeholders much further than just
certication authorities, passengers and airlines companies. Other stakeholders such as political
parties, social activity groups and related business ventures all have various degrees of inuences
on the decision making in drafting airport security execution standards. There are also statements
indicating that the real motives for airport security is not the safety of passengers, but the
combinations of interests for the major inuential stakeholders. Thus, this paper aims to investigate
the actual role of formal methods in the threat evaluation process at airport security, the inuence
of different stakeholders on the decision making process for drafting and enforcing international
standards as well as how the formal threat evaluation processes currently modelled in the
mentioned attempts are undermined by the inuence of these external stakeholders.

REFERENCES

Delahaye, David, Jean-Frdric tienne, and Vronique Vigui Donzeau-Gouge. "A formal and
sound transformation from Focal to UML: an application to airport security regulations." Innovations
in Systems and Software Engineering 4.3 (2008): 267-274.
Ledru, Yves, et al. "An attempt to combine UML and formal methods to model airport security."
CAiSE Forum. 2006.