76,438 research outputs found
Formal methods for industrial critical systems, preface to the special section
[EN] This special issue contains improved versions of selected papers from the workshops
on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS) held in Eindhoven,
The Netherlands, in November 2009 and in Antwerp, Belgium, in September
2010. These were, respectively, the 14th and 15th of a series of international
workshops organized by an open working group supported by ERCIM (European
Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) that promotes research in
all aspects of formal methods (see details in http://www.inrialpes.fr/vasy/fmics/).
The FMICS workshops that have produced this special issue considered papers
describing original, previously unpublished research and not simultaneously submitted
for publication elsewhere, and dealing with the following themes:
Design, specification, code generation and testing based on formal methods.
Methods, techniques and tools to support automated analysis, certification,
debugging, learning, optimization and transformation of complex, distributed, real-time and embedded systems.
Verification and validation methods that address shortcomings of existing
methods with respect to their industrial applicability (e.g., scalability and
usability issues).
Tools for the development of formal design descriptions.
Case studies and experience reports on industrial applications of formal
methods, focusing on lessons learned or new research directions.
Impact and costs of the adoption of formal methods.
Application of formal methods in standardization and industrial forums.
The selected papers are the result of several evaluation steps. In response to the
call for papers, FMICS 2009 received 24 papers and FMICS 2010 received 33
papers, with 10 and 14 accepted, respectively, which were published by Springer-
Verlag in the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science (volumes 5825 [1] and
6371 [2]). Each paper was reviewed by at least three anonymous referees which
provided full written evaluations. After the workshops, the authors of 10 papers
were invited to submit extended journal versions to this special issue. These papers
passed two review phases, and finally 7 were accepted to be included in the
journal.his work has been partially supported by the EU (FEDER) and the Spanish MEC TIN2010-21062-C02-02 project, MICINN INNCORPORA-PTQ program, and by Generalitat Valenciana, ref. PROMETEO2011/052.Alpuente Frasnedo, M.; Joubert ., C.; Kowalewski, S.; Roveri, M. (2013). Formal methods for industrial critical systems, preface to the special section. Science of Computer Programming. 78(7):775-777. doi:10.1016/j.scico.2012.05.005S77577778
Recommended from our members
Using formal methods to support testing
Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. While traditionally these approaches have been seen as rivals, in recent
years a new consensus has developed in which they are seen as complementary. This article reviews the state of the art regarding ways in which the presence of a formal specification can be used to assist testing
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
Formalization and Validation of Safety-Critical Requirements
The validation of requirements is a fundamental step in the development
process of safety-critical systems. In safety critical applications such as
aerospace, avionics and railways, the use of formal methods is of paramount
importance both for requirements and for design validation. Nevertheless, while
for the verification of the design, many formal techniques have been conceived
and applied, the research on formal methods for requirements validation is not
yet mature. The main obstacles are that, on the one hand, the correctness of
requirements is not formally defined; on the other hand that the formalization
and the validation of the requirements usually demands a strong involvement of
domain experts. We report on a methodology and a series of techniques that we
developed for the formalization and validation of high-level requirements for
safety-critical applications. The main ingredients are a very expressive formal
language and automatic satisfiability procedures. The language combines
first-order, temporal, and hybrid logic. The satisfiability procedures are
based on model checking and satisfiability modulo theory. We applied this
technology within an industrial project to the validation of railways
requirements
Quantitative Verification: Formal Guarantees for Timeliness, Reliability and Performance
Computerised systems appear in almost all aspects of our daily lives, often in safety-critical scenarios such as embedded control systems in cars and aircraft
or medical devices such as pacemakers and sensors. We are thus increasingly reliant on these systems working correctly, despite often operating in unpredictable or unreliable environments. Designers of such devices need ways to guarantee that they will operate in a reliable and efficient manner.
Quantitative verification is a technique for analysing quantitative aspects of a system's design, such as timeliness, reliability or performance. It applies formal methods, based on a rigorous analysis of a mathematical model of the system, to automatically prove certain precisely specified properties, e.g. ``the airbag will always deploy within 20 milliseconds after a crash'' or ``the probability of both sensors failing simultaneously is less than 0.001''.
The ability to formally guarantee quantitative properties of this kind is beneficial across a wide range of application domains. For example, in safety-critical systems, it may be essential to establish credible bounds on the probability with which certain failures or combinations of failures can occur. In embedded control systems, it is often important to comply with strict constraints on timing or resources. More generally, being able to derive guarantees on precisely specified levels of performance or efficiency is a valuable tool in the design of, for example, wireless networking protocols, robotic systems or power management algorithms, to name but a few.
This report gives a short introduction to quantitative verification, focusing in particular on a widely used technique called model checking, and its generalisation to the analysis of quantitative aspects of a system such as timing, probabilistic behaviour or resource usage.
The intended audience is industrial designers and developers of systems such as those highlighted above who could benefit from the application of quantitative verification,but lack expertise in formal verification or modelling
- …