452 research outputs found
Model-Checking an Ecosystem Model for Decision-Aid
International audience—This work stems on the idea that timed automata models and model-checking techniques may bring much in a decision-aid context when dealing with large and interacting qualitative models. In this paper, we focus on two key issues when facing the interpretation and explanation of behavior in real-world systems: the model building and its exploration using logic patterns. We illustrate this approach in the ecological domain with the modeling and exploration of a fisheries ecosystem
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
Agents and Robots for Reliable Engineered Autonomy
This book contains the contributions of the Special Issue entitled "Agents and Robots for Reliable Engineered Autonomy". The Special Issue was based on the successful first edition of the "Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy" (AREA 2020), co-located with the 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2020). The aim was to bring together researchers from autonomous agents, as well as software engineering and robotics communities, as combining knowledge from these three research areas may lead to innovative approaches that solve complex problems related to the verification and validation of autonomous robotic systems
Frontiers of Membrane Computing: Open Problems and Research Topics
This is a list of open problems and research topics collected after the Twelfth
Conference on Membrane Computing, CMC 2012 (Fontainebleau, France (23 - 26 August
2011), meant initially to be a working material for Tenth Brainstorming Week on
Membrane Computing, Sevilla, Spain (January 30 - February 3, 2012). The result was
circulated in several versions before the brainstorming and then modified according to
the discussions held in Sevilla and according to the progresses made during the meeting.
In the present form, the list gives an image about key research directions currently active
in membrane computing
A logic-based approach for the verification of UML timed models
This article presents a novel technique to formally verify models of real-time systems captured through a set of heterogeneous UML diagrams. The technique is based on the following key elements: (i) a subset of Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams, called Coretto UML (C-UML), which allows designers to describe the components of the system and their behavior through several kinds of diagrams (e.g., state machine diagrams, sequence diagrams, activity diagrams, interaction overview diagrams), and stereotypes taken from the UML Profile for Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded Systems; (ii) a formal semantics of C-UML diagrams, defined through formulae of the metric temporal logic Tempo Reale ImplicitO (TRIO); and (iii) a tool, called Corretto, which implements the aforementioned semantics and allows users to carry out formal verification tasks on modeled systems. We validate the feasibility of our approach through a set of different case studies, taken from both the academic and the industrial domain
Lazy Abstraction-Based Controller Synthesis
We present lazy abstraction-based controller synthesis (ABCS) for
continuous-time nonlinear dynamical systems against reach-avoid and safety
specifications. State-of-the-art multi-layered ABCS pre-computes multiple
finite-state abstractions of varying granularity and applies reactive synthesis
to the coarsest abstraction whenever feasible, but adaptively considers finer
abstractions when necessary. Lazy ABCS improves this technique by constructing
abstractions on demand. Our insight is that the abstract transition relation
only needs to be locally computed for a small set of frontier states at the
precision currently required by the synthesis algorithm. We show that lazy ABCS
can significantly outperform previous multi-layered ABCS algorithms: on
standard benchmarks, lazy ABCS is more than 4 times faster
Mathematics in Software Reliability and Quality Assurance
This monograph concerns the mathematical aspects of software reliability and quality assurance and consists of 11 technical papers in this emerging area. Included are the latest research results related to formal methods and design, automatic software testing, software verification and validation, coalgebra theory, automata theory, hybrid system and software reliability modeling and assessment
A virtual factory for smart city service integration
Tese de Doutoramento em Informática (MAP-i)In the context of smart cities, governments are investing efforts on creating public
value through the development of digital public services (DPS) focusing on specific
policy areas, such as transport. Main motivations to deliver DPS include reducing
administrative burdens and costs, increasing effectiveness and efficiency of government
processes, and improving citizens’ quality of life through enhanced services and simplified
interactions with governments.
To ensure effective planning and design of DPS in a given domain, governments face
several challenges, like the need of specialized tools to facilitate the effective planning
and the rapid development of DPS, as well as, tools for service integration, affording
high development costs, and ensuring DPS conform with laws and regulations.
These challenges are exacerbated by the fact that many public administrations develop
tailored DPS, disregarding the fact that services share common functionality
and business processes.
To address the above challenges, this thesis focuses on leveraging the similarities of
DPS and on applying a Software Product Line (SPL) approach combined with formal
methods techniques for specifying service models and verifying their behavioural properties.
In particular, the proposed solution introduces the concept of a virtual factory
for the planning and rapid development of DPS in a given smart city domain. The
virtual factory comprises a framework including software tools, guidelines, practices,
models, and other artefacts to assist engineers to automate and make more efficient
the development of a family of DPS.
In this work the virtual factory is populated with tools for government officials and
software developers to plan and design smart mobility services, and to rapidly model
DPS relying on SPLs and components-base development techniques.
Specific contributions of the thesis include: 1) the concept of virtual factory; 2)
a taxonomy for planning and designing smart mobility services; 3) an ontology to fix
a common vocabulary for a specific family of DPS; 4) a compositional formalism to
model SPLs, to serve as a specification language for DPS; and 5) a variable semantics
for a coordination language to simplify coordination of services in the context of SPLs.No contexto das cidades inteligentes, os governos investem esforços na criação de valor
público através do desenvolvimento de serviços públicos digitais (DPS), concentrandose
em áreas polĂticas especĂficas, como os transportes. As principais motivações para
entregar o DPS incluem a redução de custos administrativos, o aumento da eficácia
dos processos do governo e a melhoria da qualidade de vida dos cidadãos através de
serviços melhorados e interações simplificadas com os governos.
Para garantir um planeamento efetivo do DPS num determinado domĂnio, os governos
enfrentam vários desafios, como a necessidade de ferramentas especializadas para
facilitar o planeamento eficaz e o rápido desenvolvimento do DPS, bem como ferramentas
para integração de DPS, reduzindo altos custos de desenvolvimento e garantindo
que os DPS estejam em conformidade com as leis e regulamentos.
Esses desafios são exacerbados pelo fato de que muitas administrações públicas
desenvolvem o DPS sob medida, desconsiderando o fato de que os serviços compartilham
funcionalidade e processos de negĂłcios comuns.
Para enfrentar os desafios, esta tese concentra-se em aproveitar as semelhanças dos
DPS aplicando uma abordagem de Software Product Lines (SPL) combinada com métodos
formais para especificar modelos de DPS e verificar propriedades. Em particular,
introduz o conceito de uma fábrica virtual (VF) para o planeamento e desenvolvimento
rápido de DPS num domĂnio de cidade inteligente. A VF compreende ferramentas de
software, diretrizes, modelos e outros artefatos para auxiliar os engenheiros a automatizar
e tornar mais eficiente o desenvolvimento de uma famĂlia de DPS.
Neste trabalho, a VF é preenchida com ferramentas para várias partes para planear
e projetar serviços de mobilidade inteligente (MI), e modelar rapidamente o DPS com
base em SPLs e técnicas de desenvolvimento baseadas em componentes.
Contribuições especĂficas da tese incluem: 1) o conceito de VF; 2) uma taxonomia
para planear serviços de MI; 3) uma ontologia para fixar um vocabulário comum para
uma famĂlia especĂfica de DPS; 4) um formalismo composicional para modelar SPLs,
e servir como uma linguagem de especificação para DPS; e 5) uma semântica variável
para uma linguagem de coordenação para simplificar a coordenação.This work was funded by FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, through the Operational Programme for Human Capital (POCH). Grant reference: PD/BD/52238/201
- …