Real-time reactive system development : a formal approach based on UML and PVS

The notion of real-time reactive behavior encompasses concurrency, communication through sensors and actuators, and relations between input and output over time. Real-time reactive systems are inherently complex, and often used in safety-critical contexts. Application domains include control systems for nuclear reactors, air traffic, railroad crossing, telecommunications, and medical devices. Applying formal methods in the development process is seen as a means for dealing with the complexity, and for quality assurance. One of the goals is to formally verify time-dependent safety properties in the design. The scope of this thesis encompasses three major components. We develop a visual technique for object-oriented modeling of real-time reactive systems, based on a minimal set of extensions to UML, along with a set of well-formedness rules for the real-time models. We then present a formalization of the Real-Time rules of UML metamodel, and provide formal denotational and operational semantics for RTUML. Finally, we introduce a methodology for mechanized verification of time-dependent properties in the RTUML design of real-time reactive systems, within the PVS verification environment. The formal semantics of RTUML provides a foundation for the verification methodology, and for rigorous analysis and validation techniques. The novelty of the development methodology for real-time systems lies in the mechanized verification approach superimposed on the object-oriented modeling technique

Aspect-Oriented Programming

Aspect-oriented programming is a promising idea that can improve the quality of software by reduce the problem of code tangling and improving the separation of concerns. At ECOOP'97, the first AOP workshop brought together a number of researchers interested in aspect-orientation. At ECOOP'98, during the second AOP workshop the participants reported on progress in some research topics and raised more issues that were further discussed. \ud \ud This year, the ideas and concepts of AOP have been spread and adopted more widely, and, accordingly, the workshop received many submissions covering areas from design and application of aspects to design and implementation of aspect languages

The pros and cons of using SDL for creation of distributed services

In a competitive market for the creation of complex distributed services, time to market, development cost, maintenance and flexibility are key issues. Optimizing the development process is very much a matter of optimizing the technologies used during service creation. This paper reports on the experience gained in the Service Creation projects SCREEN and TOSCA on use of the language SDL for efficient service creation

A formal soundness proof of region-based memory management for object-oriented paradigm.

Region-based memory management has been proposed as a viable alternative to garbage collection for real-time applications and embedded software. In our previous work we have developed a region type inference algorithm that provides an automatic compile-time region-based memory management for object-oriented paradigm. In this work we present a formal soundness proof of the region type system that is the target of our region inference. More precisely, we prove that the object-oriented programs accepted by our region type system achieve region-based memory management in a safe way. That means, the regions follow a stack-of-regions discipline and regions deallocation never create dangling references in the store and on the program stack. Our contribution is to provide a simple syntactic proof that is based on induction and follows the standard steps of a type safety proof. In contrast the previous safety proofs provided for other region type systems employ quite elaborate techniques