Profiling the publish/subscribe paradigm for automated analysis using colored Petri nets

UML sequence diagrams are used to graphically describe the message interactions between the objects participating in a certain scenario. Combined fragments extend the basic functionality of UML sequence diagrams with control structures, such as sequences, alternatives, iterations, or parallels. In this paper, we present a UML profile to annotate sequence diagrams with combined fragments to model timed Web services with distributed resources under the publish/subscribe paradigm. This profile is exploited to automatically obtain a representation of the system based on Colored Petri nets using a novel model-to-model (M2M) transformation. This M2M transformation has been specified using QVT and has been integrated in a new add-on extending a state-of-the-art UML modeling tool. Generated Petri nets can be immediately used in well-known Petri net software, such as CPN Tools, to analyze the system behavior. Hence, our model-to-model transformation tool allows for simulating the system and finding design errors in early stages of system development, which enables us to fix them at these early phases and thus potentially saving development costs

Foundations for Safety-Critical on-Demand Medical Systems

In current medical practice, therapy is delivered in critical care environments (e.g., the ICU) by clinicians who manually coordinate sets of medical devices: The clinicians will monitor patient vital signs and then reconfigure devices (e.g., infusion pumps) as is needed. Unfortunately, the current state of practice is both burdensome on clinicians and error prone. Recently, clinicians have been speculating whether medical devices supporting ``plug & play interoperability\u27\u27 would make it easier to automate current medical workflows and thereby reduce medical errors, reduce costs, and reduce the burden on overworked clinicians. This type of plug & play interoperability would allow clinicians to attach devices to a local network and then run software applications to create a new medical system ``on-demand\u27\u27 which automates clinical workflows by automatically coordinating those devices via the network. Plug & play devices would let the clinicians build new medical systems compositionally. Unfortunately, safety is not considered a compositional property in general. For example, two independently ``safe\u27\u27 devices may interact in unsafe ways. Indeed, even the definition of ``safe\u27\u27 may differ between two device types. In this dissertation we propose a framework and define some conditions that permit reasoning about the safety of plug & play medical systems. The framework includes a logical formalism that permits formal reasoning about the safety of many device combinations at once, as well as a platform that actively prevents unintended timing interactions between devices or applications via a shared resource such as a network or CPU. We describe the various pieces of the framework, report some experimental results, and show how the pieces work together to enable the safety assessment of plug & play medical systems via a two case-studies

A PVS-Simulink Integrated Environment for Model-Based Analysis of Cyber-Physical Systems

This paper presents a methodology, with supporting tool, for formal modeling and analysis of software components in cyber-physical systems. Using our approach, developers can integrate a simulation of logic-based specifications of software components and Simulink models of continuous processes. The integrated simulation is useful to validate the characteristics of discrete system components early in the development process. The same logic-based specifications can also be formally verified using the Prototype Verification System (PVS), to gain additional confidence that the software design complies with specific safety requirements. Modeling patterns are defined for generating the logic-based specifications from the more familiar automata-based formalism. The ultimate aim of this work is to facilitate the introduction of formal verification technologies in the software development process of cyber-physical systems, which typically requires the integrated use of different formalisms and tools. A case study from the medical domain is used to illustrate the approach. A PVS model of a pacemaker is interfaced with a Simulink model of the human heart. The overall cyber-physical system is co-simulated to validate design requirements through exploration of relevant test scenarios. Formal verification with the PVS theorem prover is demonstrated for the pacemaker model for specific safety aspects of the pacemaker design

FLACOS’08 Workshop proceedings

The 2nd Workshop on Formal Languages and Analysis of Contract-Oriented Software (FLACOS’08) is held in Malta. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners working on language-based solutions to contract-oriented software development. The workshop is partially funded by the Nordunet3 project “COSoDIS” (Contract-Oriented Software Development for Internet Services) and it attracted 25 participants. The program consists of 4 regular papers and 10 invited participant presentations

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

Physically informed runtime verification for cyber physical systems

textCyber-physical systems (CPS) are an integration of computation with physical processes. CPS have gained popularity both in industry and the research community and are represented by many varied mission critical applications. Debugging CPS is important, but the intertwining of the cyber and physical worlds makes it very difficult. Formal methods, simulation, and testing are not sufficient in guarantee required correctness. Runtime Verification (RV) provides a perfect complement. However the state of the art in RV lacks either efficiency or expressiveness, and very few RV technologies are specifically designed for CPS. The CPS community requires an intuitive, expressive, and practical RV middleware toolset to improve the state of the art. In this proposal, I take an incremental and realistic approach to identify and address the research challenges in CPS verification and validation. Firstly, I carry out a systematic analysis of the state of the art and state of the practice in verifying and validating CPS using a structured on-line survey, semi-structured interviews, and an exhaustive literature review. From the findings obtained, I identify the key research gaps and propose research directions to address these research gaps. My second work is to work on the most pertinent research direction proposed, which is to provide a practical and physically informed runtime verification tool-sets specifically designed for CPS as a sound foundation to the trial and error practice identified as the state of the art in verifying and validating CPS. I create an expressive yet intuitive language (BraceAssertion) to specify CPS properties. I develop a framework (BraceBind) to supplement CPS runtime verification with a real time simulation environment which is able to integrate physical models from various simulation platform. Based on BraceAssertion and BraceBind, which collectively captures the combination of logical content and physical environment, I develop a practical runtime verification framework (Brace), which is efficient, effective, expressive in capturing both local and global properties, and guarantee predictable runtime monitors behavior even with unpredictable surge of events. I evaluate the tool-set with increasingly complex real CPS applications of smart agent systems.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Verifying temporal specifications of Java programs

Many Java programs encode temporal behaviors in their source code, typically mixing three features provided by the Java language: (1) pausing the execution for a limited amount of time, (2) waiting for an event that has to occur before a deadline expires, and (3) comparing timestamps. In this work, we show how to exploit modern SMT solvers together with static analysis in order to produce a network of timed automata approximating the temporal behavior of a set of Java threads. We also prove that the presented abstraction preserves the truth of MTL and ATCTL formulae, two well-known logics for expressing timed specifications. As far as we know, this is the first feasible approach enabling the user to automatically model check timed specifications of Java software directly from the source code