COST Action IC 1402 ArVI: Runtime Verification Beyond Monitoring -- Activity Report of Working Group 1

This report presents the activities of the first working group of the COST Action ArVI, Runtime Verification beyond Monitoring. The report aims to provide an overview of some of the major core aspects involved in Runtime Verification. Runtime Verification is the field of research dedicated to the analysis of system executions. It is often seen as a discipline that studies how a system run satisfies or violates correctness properties. The report exposes a taxonomy of Runtime Verification (RV) presenting the terminology involved with the main concepts of the field. The report also develops the concept of instrumentation, the various ways to instrument systems, and the fundamental role of instrumentation in designing an RV framework. We also discuss how RV interplays with other verification techniques such as model-checking, deductive verification, model learning, testing, and runtime assertion checking. Finally, we propose challenges in monitoring quantitative and statistical data beyond detecting property violation

Contract Aware Components, 10 years after

The notion of contract aware components has been published roughly ten years ago and is now becoming mainstream in several fields where the usage of software components is seen as critical. The goal of this paper is to survey domains such as Embedded Systems or Service Oriented Architecture where the notion of contract aware components has been influential. For each of these domains we briefly describe what has been done with this idea and we discuss the remaining challenges.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

Search based software engineering: Trends, techniques and applications

© ACM, 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version is available from the link below.In the past five years there has been a dramatic increase in work on Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE), an approach to Software Engineering (SE) in which Search-Based Optimization (SBO) algorithms are used to address problems in SE. SBSE has been applied to problems throughout the SE lifecycle, from requirements and project planning to maintenance and reengineering. The approach is attractive because it offers a suite of adaptive automated and semiautomated solutions in situations typified by large complex problem spaces with multiple competing and conflicting objectives. This article provides a review and classification of literature on SBSE. The work identifies research trends and relationships between the techniques applied and the applications to which they have been applied and highlights gaps in the literature and avenues for further research.EPSRC and E

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

Quantitative Analysis of Probabilistic Models of Software Product Lines with Statistical Model Checking

We investigate the suitability of statistical model checking techniques for analysing quantitative properties of software product line models with probabilistic aspects. For this purpose, we enrich the feature-oriented language FLan with action rates, which specify the likelihood of exhibiting particular behaviour or of installing features at a specific moment or in a specific order. The enriched language (called PFLan) allows us to specify models of software product lines with probabilistic configurations and behaviour, e.g. by considering a PFLan semantics based on discrete-time Markov chains. The Maude implementation of PFLan is combined with the distributed statistical model checker MultiVeStA to perform quantitative analyses of a simple product line case study. The presented analyses include the likelihood of certain behaviour of interest (e.g. product malfunctioning) and the expected average cost of products.Comment: In Proceedings FMSPLE 2015, arXiv:1504.0301

The benefits of using a walking interface to navigate virtual environments

Navigation is the most common interactive task performed in three-dimensional virtual environments (VEs), but it is also a task that users often find difficult. We investigated how body-based information about the translational and rotational components of movement helped participants to perform a navigational search task (finding targets hidden inside boxes in a room-sized space). When participants physically walked around the VE while viewing it on a head-mounted display (HMD), they then performed 90% of trials perfectly, comparable to participants who had performed an equivalent task in the real world during a previous study. By contrast, participants performed less than 50% of trials perfectly if they used a tethered HMD (move by physically turning but pressing a button to translate) or a desktop display (no body-based information). This is the most complex navigational task in which a real-world level of performance has been achieved in a VE. Behavioral data indicates that both translational and rotational body-based information are required to accurately update one's position during navigation, and participants who walked tended to avoid obstacles, even though collision detection was not implemented and feedback not provided. A walking interface would bring immediate benefits to a number of VE applications