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

Synthesis of Minimal Error Control Software

Software implementations of controllers for physical systems are at the core of many embedded systems. The design of controllers uses the theory of dynamical systems to construct a mathematical control law that ensures that the controlled system has certain properties, such as asymptotic convergence to an equilibrium point, while optimizing some performance criteria. However, owing to quantization errors arising from the use of fixed-point arithmetic, the implementation of this control law can only guarantee practical stability: under the actions of the implementation, the trajectories of the controlled system converge to a bounded set around the equilibrium point, and the size of the bounded set is proportional to the error in the implementation. The problem of verifying whether a controller implementation achieves practical stability for a given bounded set has been studied before. In this paper, we change the emphasis from verification to automatic synthesis. Using synthesis, the need for formal verification can be considerably reduced thereby reducing the design time as well as design cost of embedded control software. We give a methodology and a tool to synthesize embedded control software that is Pareto optimal w.r.t. both performance criteria and practical stability regions. Our technique is a combination of static analysis to estimate quantization errors for specific controller implementations and stochastic local search over the space of possible controllers using particle swarm optimization. The effectiveness of our technique is illustrated using examples of various standard control systems: in most examples, we achieve controllers with close LQR-LQG performance but with implementation errors, hence regions of practical stability, several times as small.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figure

A study of systems implementation languages for the POCCNET system

The results are presented of a study of systems implementation languages for the Payload Operations Control Center Network (POCCNET). Criteria are developed for evaluating the languages, and fifteen existing languages are evaluated on the basis of these criteria