Modeling and Testing a Family of Surgical Robots: An Experience Report

Safety-critical applications often use dependability cases to validate that specified properties are invariant, or to demonstrate a counter example showing how that property might be violated. However, most dependability cases are written with a single product in mind. At the same time, software product lines (families of related software products) have been studied with the goal of modeling variability and commonality, and building family based techniques for both analysis and testing. However, there has been little work on building an end to end dependability case for a software product line (where a property is modeled, a counter example is found and then validated as a true positive via testing), and none that we know of in an emerging safety-critical domain, that of robotic surgery. In this paper, we study a family of surgical robots, that combine hardware and software, and are highly configurable, representing over 1300 unique robots. At the same time, they are considered safety-critical and should have associated dependability cases. We perform a case study to understand how we can bring together lightweight formal analysis, feature modeling, and testing to provide an end to end pipeline to find potential violations of important safety properties. In the process, we learned that there are some interesting and open challenges for the research community, which if solved will lead towards more dependable safety-critical cyber-physical systems

Formal Modeling and Analysis of a Family of Surgical Robots

Safety-critical applications often use dependability cases to validate that specified properties are invariant, or to demonstrate a counterexample showing how that property might be violated. However, most dependability cases are written with a single product in mind. At the same time, software product lines (families of related software products) have been studied with the goal of modeling variability and commonality and building family-based techniques for both modeling and analysis. This thesis presents a novel approach for building an end to end dependability case for a software product line, where a property is formally modeled, a counterexample is found and then validated as a true positive via testing. There has not been such a study that we know of in an emerging safety-critical domain, specifically of robotic surgery. This thesis will detail a study on a family of surgical robots that combine hardware and software components and are highly configurable, representing over 1300 unique robots. At the same time, these robot systems are considered safety-critical and should have associated dependability cases. We conducted a case study to understand how we can bring together lightweight formal analysis, feature modeling, and testing to provide an end to end pipeline to find potential violations of important safety properties. In the process, we learned that there are some interesting and open challenges for the research community, which if solved will lead towards more dependable safety-critical cyber-physical systems. Adviser: Hamid Bagher

Formal Modeling and Analysis of a Family of Surgical Robots

Safety-critical applications often use dependability cases to validate that specified properties are invariant, or to demonstrate a counterexample showing how that property might be violated. However, most dependability cases are written with a single product in mind. At the same time, software product lines (families of related software products) have been studied with the goal of modeling variability and commonality and building family-based techniques for both modeling and analysis. This thesis presents a novel approach for building an end to end dependability case for a software product line, where a property is formally modeled, a counterexample is found and then validated as a true positive via testing. There has not been such a study that we know of in an emerging safety-critical domain, specifically of robotic surgery. This thesis will detail a study on a family of surgical robots that combine hardware and software components and are highly configurable, representing over 1300 unique robots. At the same time, these robot systems are considered safety-critical and should have associated dependability cases. We conducted a case study to understand how we can bring together lightweight formal analysis, feature modeling, and testing to provide an end to end pipeline to find potential violations of important safety properties. In the process, we learned that there are some interesting and open challenges for the research community, which if solved will lead towards more dependable safety-critical cyber-physical systems. Adviser: Hamid Bagher

An Empirical Assessment of Formal Models and Static Analysis Alarms in the Context of Defect Detection

Software developers work with different programming languages and tools in their careers. Software maintenance is one of the essential parts of a developer\u27s job. It includes locating and correcting defects in software systems. Understanding how developers comprehend programs and their process of finding and fixing bugs is essential for creating better tools to improve their productivity and workflow. It also gives us insight into their cognitive processes while working on these tasks, which can help build theories for teaching and learning programming. This dissertation presents three studies on assessing formal models and static analysis alarms in the context of defect detection. The first is an online empirical study on the effects of experience on bug fixing tasks in the Alloy specification language, a lightweight formal language with accompanying software that performs bounded model checking to facilitate verifying properties of software models. The study found that non-novices performed 54% better on the Alloy tasks compared to novices, and participants performed better on syntactic tasks compared to semantic tasks. Insights from the participants\u27 problem solving patterns are presented. The second and third studies investigate the effects of repositioning and merging static analysis alarms used to detect software defects on task accuracy and developers\u27 visual effort. The data for the first study was collected through an online survey, and in the second study, eye tracking was used to collect the participants\u27 gazes while working on the tasks. Each study was done independently, with no overlap between participants. Both studies\u27 results indicate that the repositioning and merging treatment do not affect accuracy. However, the eye tracking study results indicate that there is a significant difference in visual effort with the repositioning and merging of alarms as it draws the focus and attention of the developers to the most important parts of the program to solve tasks. The impact of these results on languages and tools to assist developers in defect detection is discussed

An Empirical Assessment on Merging and Repositioning of Static Analysis Alarms-Replication Package

Replication package including artifacts and data of the paper accepted in SCAM 202

Assessing the Effect of Programming Language and Task On Eye Movements

The replication package for an eye tracking study on the effects of programming languages (python and c++) and tasks (bug fixing and feature addition) on eye movement

Modeling and Testing a Family of Surgical Robots: An Experience Report

Safety-critical applications often use dependability cases to validate that specified properties are invariant, or to demonstrate a counter example showing how that property might be violated. However, most dependability cases are written with a single product in mind. At the same time, software product lines (families of related software products) have been studied with the goal of modeling variability and commonality, and building family based techniques for both analysis and testing. However, there has been little work on building an end to end dependability case for a software product line (where a property is modeled, a counter example is found and then validated as a true positive via testing), and none that we know of in an emerging safety-critical domain, that of robotic surgery. In this paper, we study a family of surgical robots, that combine hardware and software, and are highly configurable, representing over 1300 unique robots. At the same time, they are considered safety-critical and should have associated dependability cases. We perform a case study to understand how we can bring together lightweight formal analysis, feature modeling, and testing to provide an end to end pipeline to find potential violations of important safety properties. In the process, we learned that there are some interesting and open challenges for the research community, which if solved will lead towards more dependable safety-critical cyber-physical systems

In vitro antibacterial activity of Bunium persicum and Rheum ribes on Acinetobacter baumanii

Introduction: Using antibiotics to control pathogenic bacteria is associated with certain side effects in addition to emergence of drug resistance. Nowadays, researchers are considering using plants as suitable alternatives to antibiotics. The aim of study was to compare in vitro antimicrobial activities of aqueous and hydroalcoholic Bunium persicum and Rheum ribes L. extracts on Acinetobacter baumanii. Materials and methods: Different concentrations of R. ribes and B. persicum were prepared to determine microbial sensitivity of A. baumanii using disk diffusion, minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC), and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC). Results: The highest MIC (256 µg/ml) against A. baumanii was derived for aqueous R. ribes and B. persicum extracts and the lowest MIC (128 µg/ml) for their hydroalcoholic extracts. The highest MBC (512 µg/ml) was derived for aqueous R. ribes extract and the lowest MBC (256 µg/ml) for aqueous and hydroalcoholic R. ribes and B. persicum and hydroalcoholic R. ribes extracts. The extracts exhibited great inhibitory effects against the studied bacteria in disk diffusion; and with increasing the extracts’ concentrations, the inhibitory effect was exhibited more markedly as increased diameter of inhibition zone. Conclusion: Hydroalcoholic R. ribes and B. persicum extracts can be used as nature-based compounds to control A. baumanii. &nbsp