Développement et validation d'un questionnaire d'état général et de qualité de vie chez les chiens atteints de cardiopathie

L’insuffisance cardiaque est une affection chronique de plus en plus répandue avec la médicalisation des chiens et l’augmentation de leur espérance de vie. Elle a des répercussions certaines sur la vie quotidienne de l’animal. Nous avons voulu définir et valider un outil d’évaluation de cette qualité de vie chez le chien insuffisant cardiaque. En s’appuyant sur une revue de la littérature en médecine humaine et vétérinaire, nous avons défini un questionnaire de 18 questions, distribué au sein des consultations de cardiologie de l’Ecole Vétérinaire de Toulouse. Nous avons étudié ensuite sa validité, en mesurant sa fiabilité, et en étudiant les corrélations entre les différents scores obtenus. Ce nouvel instrument s’est avéré valide. Il pourra ainsi être distribué à plus grande échelle afin d’une part parfaire son évaluation, en particulier en ce qui concerne la réponse au traitement, et d’autre part d’aider le clinicien à mieux évaluer l’état de santé de l’animal, son stade et pourra aider tant le propriétaire que le clinicien à la prise de décision

Analysing the Control Software of the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider

The control software of the CERN Compact Muon Solenoid experiment contains over 30,000 finite state machines. These state machines are organised hierarchically: commands are sent down the hierarchy and state changes are sent upwards. The sheer size of the system makes it virtually impossible to fully understand the details of its behaviour at the macro level. This is fuelled by unclarities that already exist at the micro level. We have solved the latter problem by formally describing the finite state machines in the mCRL2 process algebra. The translation has been implemented using the ASF+SDF meta-environment, and its correctness was assessed by means of simulations and visualisations of individual finite state machines and through formal verification of subsystems of the control software. Based on the formalised semantics of the finite state machines, we have developed dedicated tooling for checking properties that can be verified on finite state machines in isolation.Comment: To appear in FSEN'11. Extended version with details of the ASF+SDF translation of SML into mCRL

Reverse Engineering of Middleware for Verification of Robot Control Architectures

We consider the problem of automating the verification of distributed control software relying on publish-subscribe middleware. In this scenario, the main challenge is that software correctness depends intrinsically on correct usage of middleware components, but structured models of such components might not be available for analysis, e.g., because they are too large and complex to be described precisely in a cost-effective way. To overcome this problem, we propose to identify abstract models of middleware as finite-state automata, and then to perform verification on the combined middleware and control software models. Both steps are carried out in a computer-assisted way using state-of-the-art techniques in automata-based identification and verification. Our main contribution is to show that the combination of identification and verification is feasible and useful when considering typical issues that arise in the implementation of distributed control software.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. The final version of the article is published in Proc. of "Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots", SIMPAR 2014 (published by Springer

Non-Zero Sum Games for Reactive Synthesis

In this invited contribution, we summarize new solution concepts useful for the synthesis of reactive systems that we have introduced in several recent publications. These solution concepts are developed in the context of non-zero sum games played on graphs. They are part of the contributions obtained in the inVEST project funded by the European Research Council.Comment: LATA'16 invited pape

Efficient Symmetry Reduction and the Use of State Symmetries for Symbolic Model Checking

One technique to reduce the state-space explosion problem in temporal logic model checking is symmetry reduction. The combination of symmetry reduction and symbolic model checking by using BDDs suffered a long time from the prohibitively large BDD for the orbit relation. Dynamic symmetry reduction calculates representatives of equivalence classes of states dynamically and thus avoids the construction of the orbit relation. In this paper, we present a new efficient model checking algorithm based on dynamic symmetry reduction. Our experiments show that the algorithm is very fast and allows the verification of larger systems. We additionally implemented the use of state symmetries for symbolic symmetry reduction. To our knowledge we are the first who investigated state symmetries in combination with BDD based symbolic model checking

Interrupt Timed Automata: verification and expressiveness

We introduce the class of Interrupt Timed Automata (ITA), a subclass of hybrid automata well suited to the description of timed multi-task systems with interruptions in a single processor environment. While the reachability problem is undecidable for hybrid automata we show that it is decidable for ITA. More precisely we prove that the untimed language of an ITA is regular, by building a finite automaton as a generalized class graph. We then establish that the reachability problem for ITA is in NEXPTIME and in PTIME when the number of clocks is fixed. To prove the first result, we define a subclass ITA- of ITA, and show that (1) any ITA can be reduced to a language-equivalent automaton in ITA- and (2) the reachability problem in this subclass is in NEXPTIME (without any class graph). In the next step, we investigate the verification of real time properties over ITA. We prove that model checking SCL, a fragment of a timed linear time logic, is undecidable. On the other hand, we give model checking procedures for two fragments of timed branching time logic. We also compare the expressive power of classical timed automata and ITA and prove that the corresponding families of accepted languages are incomparable. The result also holds for languages accepted by controlled real-time automata (CRTA), that extend timed automata. We finally combine ITA with CRTA, in a model which encompasses both classes and show that the reachability problem is still decidable. Additionally we show that the languages of ITA are neither closed under complementation nor under intersection

Treatment of Facial Seborrheic Dermatitis with Pimecrolimus Cream 1%: An Open-Label Clinical Study in Korean Patients

Pimecrolimus cream 1% has shown to be effective in patients with a variety of inflammatory cutaneous disorders. And it might be a useful modality in the treatment of seborrheic dermatitis. This prospective study was aimed at assessing the efficacy and tolerability of pimecrolimus cream 1% in the treatment of facial seborrheic dermatitis. Twenty patients were instructed to apply pimecrolimus cream 1% for 4 consecutive weeks. Assessment of the disease severity was performed at baseline and at week 1, 2, and 4. Clinical assessments of erythema, scaling, and pruritus were measured using a 4-point scale (0-3). Global assessments of the disease severity by patients and investigators were performed at each visit. Mean clinical scores of erythema, scaling, and pruritus significantly improved by 87.4%, 91.9%, and 91.5% respectively at week 4 (p<0.001). Improvements in the global assessment of disease severity determined by patients and investigators also showed excellent results. No specific adverse events other than transient burning and tingling sensations were noted. The relapse of facial seborrheic dermatitis was mostly observed between 3 to 8 weeks after the discontinuation of pimecrolimus. We suggest that the topical application of pimecrolimus cream 1% can be an effective and safe alternative for treatment of facial seborrheic dermatitis

Verification of Decision Making Software in an Autonomous Vehicle: An Industrial Case Study

Correctness of autonomous driving systems is crucial as\ua0incorrect behaviour may have catastrophic consequences. Many different\ua0hardware and software components (e.g. sensing, decision making, actuation,\ua0and control) interact to solve the autonomous driving task, leading to a level of complexity that brings new challenges for the formal verification\ua0community. Though formal verification has been used to prove\ua0correctness of software, there are significant challenges in transferring\ua0such techniques to an agile software development process and to ensure\ua0widespread industrial adoption. In the light of these challenges, the identification\ua0of appropriate formalisms, and consequently the right verification\ua0tools, has significant impact on addressing them. In this paper, we\ua0evaluate the application of different formal techniques from supervisory\ua0control theory, model checking, and deductive verification to verify existing\ua0decision and control software (in development) for an autonomous\ua0vehicle. We discuss how the verification objective differs with respect tothe choice of formalism and the level of formality that can be applied.\ua0Insights from the case study show a need for multiple formal methods to\ua0prove correctness, the difficulty to capture the right level of abstraction\ua0to model and specify the formal properties for the verification objectives