Ran Wei 魏然
Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Computer Science at the
School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, UK.
Research interests: Model Driven Engineering, Model Based Systems Engineering, safety assurance, and AI-augmented software engineering.
News¶
About Me¶
I am a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Computer Science at the School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, UK. I maintain a visiting research collaboration with the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. My background is in Model Driven Engineering (MDE), which I apply to Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), high-integrity systems and model-based assurance.
I contribute to the Structured Assurance Case Metamodel (SACM) from the Object Management Group and the Goal Structuring Notation (GSN) from the Assurance Case Working Group. I am a certified ISO 26262 Functional Safety Engineer, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA), and a member of the Institute for Systems Engineering (IfSE), formerly INCOSE UK. I lead the development of Principia, a commercial-grade MBSE toolchain.
Prior to my current position, I had taken the following roles:
- Research Assistant Professor (2023–2024) at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK — worked with Dr Lavindra de Silva and Prof Ioannis Brilakis to explore Digital Twin applications in the construction sector.
- Associate Professor (2020–2023) at the School of Artificial Intelligence, Dalian University of Technology, China — worked on the automated assurance of safety critical systems, to assure the safety of critical systems with AI/ML capabilities.
- Research Fellow (2013–2020) at the Department of Computer Science, University of York, UK — worked on Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and its application in safety critical systems. Member of the Automated Software Engineering research group.
- PhD Student (2012–2016) in the ASE research group, Department of Computer Science, University of York, UK — supervised by Prof Dimitris Kolovos. [Thesis]
Research Vision¶
Modern safety-critical systems must be rigorously justified as acceptably safe before deployment. This justification process — Safety Critical Systems Engineering (SCSE) — demands extensive analysis, verification, and validation across diverse engineering artifacts, tools, and formats, often culminating in a safety case that must withstand independent review and certification. Yet SCSE today remains overwhelmingly manual, creating a bottleneck that intensifies as systems grow in complexity and become increasingly adaptive and open at runtime.
My research tackles this bottleneck by bringing automation to the core activities of SCSE, spanning the following interconnected themes:
Model Based Systems Engineering & Tooling. Much of my work is grounded in MBSE, which provides the rigour and machine-processable representations needed for automation. I have contributed to the development of modelling standards — notably SACM and GSN — and to the Epsilon model-management platform. I led the development of the Assurance Case Management Environment (ACME) for SACM and GSN. I am now developing Principia, an MBSE toolchain bringing modelling, simulation and assurance together; its codebase contains approximately 8.86 million lines.
Traceability & the Digital Thread. A recurring challenge in systems engineering is maintaining coherent traceability across heterogeneous artifacts produced by different tools throughout the system lifecycle. My work addresses this by establishing model-based digital threads that link requirements, design models, safety analyses, and assurance arguments, enabling automated impact analysis and change propagation when any part of the system evolves.
Automated Safety Analysis & Assurance. Working with wonderful collaborators, I have contributed to automated safety case validation, automated system safety analysis (e.g. the DECISIVE framework for iterative design-time safety analysis), formal verification of system behaviours through the integration of theorem provers such as Isabelle/SACM, and the ACCESS framework for assurance-case-centric engineering of safety-critical systems.
Digital Twins for Runtime Assurance. More recently, I have been exploring Digital Twin technologies for runtime monitoring and assurance of systems and systems of systems — from highway infrastructure maintenance to space launch vehicles. Digital Twins offer a promising paradigm for maintaining a live, model-based representation of a system throughout its operational life, enabling continuous assurance even as the system and its environment change.
AI-augmented software engineering. My current research direction follows the slogan “LLMs draft, formal methods discriminate, and assurance cases explain.” LLMs propose code and system models; formal methods check them against requirements and safety properties; assurance cases present the evidence and reasoning behind the results. Recent work includes formal-method-guided generation of safety-critical software and traceable system models generated from requirements. The first paper is under major revision at ACM TOSEM; the second has been submitted to Communications Engineering.
I am always happy to discuss ideas — feel free to reach out by email!