6,028 research outputs found
Extracting monitors from JUnit tests
A large portion of the software development industry relies on testing as the main technique for quality assurance while other techniques which can provide extra guarantees are largely ignored. A case in point is runtime verification which provides assurance that a system’s execution flow is correct at runtime. Compared to testing, this technique has the advantage of checking the actual runs of a system rather than a number of representative testcases. Based on experience with the local industry, one of the main reasons for this lack of uptake of runtime verification is the extra effort required to formally specify the correctness criteria to be checked at runtime — runtime verifiers are typically synthesised from formal specifications. One potential approach to counteract this issue would be to use the information available in tests to automatically obtain monitors. The plausibility of this approach is the similarity between tests and runtime verifiers: tests drive the system under test and check that the outcome is correct while runtime verifiers let the system users drive the system under observation but still has to check that the outcome is as expected.peer-reviewe
SOTER: A Runtime Assurance Framework for Programming Safe Robotics Systems
The recent drive towards achieving greater autonomy and intelligence in
robotics has led to high levels of complexity. Autonomous robots increasingly
depend on third party off-the-shelf components and complex machine-learning
techniques. This trend makes it challenging to provide strong design-time
certification of correct operation.
To address these challenges, we present SOTER, a robotics programming
framework with two key components: (1) a programming language for implementing
and testing high-level reactive robotics software and (2) an integrated runtime
assurance (RTA) system that helps enable the use of uncertified components,
while still providing safety guarantees. SOTER provides language primitives to
declaratively construct a RTA module consisting of an advanced,
high-performance controller (uncertified), a safe, lower-performance controller
(certified), and the desired safety specification. The framework provides a
formal guarantee that a well-formed RTA module always satisfies the safety
specification, without completely sacrificing performance by using higher
performance uncertified components whenever safe. SOTER allows the complex
robotics software stack to be constructed as a composition of RTA modules,
where each uncertified component is protected using a RTA module.
To demonstrate the efficacy of our framework, we consider a real-world
case-study of building a safe drone surveillance system. Our experiments both
in simulation and on actual drones show that the SOTER-enabled RTA ensures the
safety of the system, including when untrusted third-party components have bugs
or deviate from the desired behavior
Formal certification and compliance for run-time service environments
With the increased awareness of security and safety of services in on-demand distributed service provisioning (such
as the recent adoption of Cloud infrastructures), certification and compliance checking of services is becoming a key element for service engineering. Existing certification techniques tend to support mainly design-time checking of service properties and tend not to support the run-time monitoring and progressive certification in the service execution environment. In this paper we discuss an approach which provides both design-time and runtime behavioural compliance checking for a services architecture, through enabling a progressive event-driven model-checking technique. Providing an integrated approach to certification and compliance is a challenge however using analysis and monitoring techniques we present such an approach for on-going compliance checking
Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India
The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India
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