ASSERT: a step towards reliable and scientific system and software engineering.

International audienceThe ASSERT (www.assert-project.org) project (Automated proof-based System and Software Engineering for Real-Time systems) is an integrated project partially funded by the European Commission within the Information Society Technologies priority of the 6th Framework Program in the area of embedded systems. The project is coordinated by the European Space Agency (ESA) in the TEC directorate (Technical and Quality management), Software Systems division. The assert consortium is made of 28 partners (see the full list in section 7) representing the space industry, research laboratories, software houses and tool developers. The project started in September 2004 and has ended in December 2007. The main objective of ASSERT is to change the way system and software engineering is performed today to adopt a more reliable and scientific approach based on modelling, preservation of system properties and model transformation down to the final code.The current results include a process, a set of tool prototypes and case studies demonstrating the validity of the overall approach. The project results will now be disseminated in operational projects through the support of ESA, the tool and technologies providers and the industrialists from the space sector

The TASTE Toolset: turning human designed heterogeneous systems into computer built homogeneous software.

The TASTE tool-set results from spin-off studies of the ASSERT project, which started in 2004 with the objective to propose innovative and pragmatic solutions to develop real-time software. One of the primary targets was satellite flight software, but it appeared quickly that their characteristics were shared among various embedded systems. The solutions that we developed now comprise a process and several tools ; the development process is based on the idea that real-time, embedded systems are heterogeneous by nature and that a unique UML-like language was not helping neither their construction, nor their validation. Rather than inventing yet another "ultimate" language, TASTE makes the link between existing and mature technologies such as Simulink, SDL, ASN.1, C, Ada, and generates complete, homogeneous software-based systems that one can straightforwardly download and execute on a physical target. Our current prototype is moving toward a marketed product, and sequel studies are already in place to support, among others, FPGA systems

Extending ASSERT for HW/SW Co-design

Embedded systems are commonly designed by specifying and developing hardware and software systems separately. On the contrary, the hardware/software (HW/SW) co-development exploits the trade-offs between hardware and software in a system through their concurrent design. HW/SW Codevelopment techniques take advantage of the flexibility of system design to create architectures that can meet stringent performance requirements with a shorter design cycle. This paper presents the work done within the scope of ESA HWSWCO (Hardware-Software Co-design) study. The main objective of this study has been to address the HW/SW co-design phase to integrate this engineering task as part of the ASSERT process (refer to [1]) and compatible with the existing ASSERT approach, process and tool, Advances in the automation of the design of HW and SW and the adoption of the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) [9] paradigm make possible the definition of a proper integration substrate and enables the continuous interaction of the HW and SW design paths

TASTE: An open-source tool-chain for embedded system and software development

International audienceThis paper presents the results of the past two years of continuous development of the TASTE tool-set. TASTE is a development environment dedicated to embedded, real-time systems and was created under the initiative of the European Space Agency back in 2008, after the completion of a FP6 project called ASSERT. TASTE is free and open source, and is currently used to design small to medium-size systems; it relies on two powerful and complementary modeling languages: ASN.1 and AADL, and comes together with a solid engineering approach. TASTE brings ideas on how a system can be optimally built, by taking and putting together components of heterogeneous nature, and making sure that they run according to their specification and without software hacking introduced during the development. The latest TASTE improvements include several major features such as the integration of VHDL components, the recording/replay of runtime scenarii using message sequence charts, the support of legacy encoding protocols, means to inspect and patch data at runtime, and the generation of systems for additional platforms such as RT Linux (Xenomai). Our graphical front-ends have also been redesigned to offer a better user experience

THE ASSERT SET OF TOOLS FOR ENGINEERING (TASTE): DEMONSTRATOR, HW/SW CODESIGN, AND FUTURE

International audienceThis paper reports the results of a project funded by ESA on the use and development of TASTE (The ASSERT Set of Tools for Engineering). TASTE is a set of tools which, ruled by a clear methodology, aims to ease and secure the building of Real-Time Embedded (RTE) systems. The first goal of this project was to evaluate TASTE with an industrial case study, the realization of a satellite demonstrator, so as to confirm its maturity level. Technologies, design and application scenario of the demonstrator were chosen to be very realistic. The second goal of the project was to extend TASTE capabilities by adding hardware/software codesign support to the toolset. Many RTE systems are software and hardware, so adding such codesign support to TASTE broadens the range of targeted systems. For this purpose, basic hardware support was added to the toolset, and the combination between TASTE and SpaceStudio, a full HW/SW codesign environment, has been studied. With this project, we have been able to demonstrate that TASTE could be an answer to the "missing link" between high level system description and equipment design, for systems ranging from simple software-only systems to complex hardware/software systems

Resistance status of antibiotics in Gram-positive bacteria isolated from acne lesions in İstanbul

Background and Design: Acne vulgaris is a multifactorial disease in which Propionibacterium acnes is thought to play an important role in the pathogenesis of inflamed lesions. There is also significant in vitro evidence suggesting a possible pathogenetic role for Staphylococci in acne vulgaris and an in vitro study of patients who were undergoing evaluation for acne, showed that 53% of participants were colonised with Staphylococcus epidermidis. Materials and Methods: In this study, 29 P. acnes isolates and 61 coagulase-negative staphylococci (CNS) isolates were obtained from 169 specimens belonging to patients with inflammatory acne vulgaris and the antimicrobial susceptibilities of these isolates against nadifloxacin, erythromycin, clindamycin and tetracycline were determined at the minimum inhibitory concentration levels, using the ‘Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute’ agar dilution method. Results: There were no P. acnes isolate resistant to the antibiotics tested in this study and the antibiotic resistance status among CNS was as 28%, 36%, 23% and 0% for tetracycline, erythromycin, clindamycine and nadifloxacin, respectively. Conclusion: According to the results of this study, it may be expected that nadifloxacin could be more effective in the treatment of acne than other antimicrobial agents because of having no resistance to both P. acnes and CNS. However, this must be supported by clinical trials. Although resistance rates were found to be relatively low in this study, the antibiotic resistance problem should be taken into consideration while planning a treatment to get successful results. In case of treatment failures, presence of drug resistant strains should be considered

Accurate selection of insulin immunoassay to discern factitious hypoglycemia: a case report

International audienceNo abstract availabl

Space Software Validation using Abstract Interpretation

International audienceThis paper reports the results of an ESA funded project on the use of abstract interpretation to validate critical real-time embedded space software. Abstract interpretation is industrially used since several years, especially for the validation of the Ariane 5 launcher. However, the limitations of the tools used so far prevented a wider deployment. Astrium Space Transportation, CEA, and ENS have analyzed the performances of two recent tools on a case study extracted from the safety software of the ATV: * ASTRÉE, developed by ENS and CNRS, to check for run-time errors, * FLUCTUAT, developed by CEA, to analyse the accuracy of numerical computations. The conclusion of the study is that the performance of this new generation of tools has dramatically increased (no false alarms and fine analysis of numerical precision)