An Extensible Static Analysis Framework for Automated Analysis, Validation and Performance Improvement of Model Management Programs

Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is a state-of-the-art software engineering approach, which adopts models as first class artefacts. In MDE, modelling tools and task-specific model management languages are used to reason about the system under development and to (automatically) produce software artefacts such as working code and documentation. Existing tools which provide state-of-the-art model management languages exhibit the lack of support for automatic static analysis for error detection (especially when models defined in various modelling technologies are involved within a multi-step MDE development process) and for performance optimisation (especially when very large models are involved in model management operations). This thesis investigates the hypothesis that static analysis of model management programs in the context of MDE can help with the detection of potential runtime errors and can be also used to achieve automated performance optimisation of such programs. To assess the validity of this hypothesis, a static analysis framework for the Epsilon family of model management languages is designed and implemented. The static analysis framework is evaluated in terms of its support for analysis of task-specific model management programs involving models defined in different modelling technologies, and its ability to improve the performance of model management programs operating on large models

A model-derivation framework for timing analysis of Java software Systems

One of the main challenges in developing a software system is to assure that its properties fulfill the specifications. In the context of this paper, we are especially interested in timing properties. Model-based software verification is one of the approaches to achieve this. However, model-based verification requires expressive models of software systems and deriving such models is not a trivial task. Although there are a few model derivation tool proposals for the purpose of model-checking timing properties, these are dedicated tools supporting a selected set of verification techniques and as such they are not explicitly designed for coping with new demands. This paper presents a framework that derives models from Java programs in an automated way for analyzing timing properties. The framework has the following properties that are not provided by the previous proposals: (1) Efficiency in model development, (2) consistency of models with software, (3) expressiveness of models, (4) scalability and (5) extensibility of the model derivation process

Automatic Software Repair: a Bibliography

This article presents a survey on automatic software repair. Automatic software repair consists of automatically finding a solution to software bugs without human intervention. This article considers all kinds of repairs. First, it discusses behavioral repair where test suites, contracts, models, and crashing inputs are taken as oracle. Second, it discusses state repair, also known as runtime repair or runtime recovery, with techniques such as checkpoint and restart, reconfiguration, and invariant restoration. The uniqueness of this article is that it spans the research communities that contribute to this body of knowledge: software engineering, dependability, operating systems, programming languages, and security. It provides a novel and structured overview of the diversity of bug oracles and repair operators used in the literature

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial