Highly Adaptable and Trustworthy Software using Formal Methods (HATS)
This page describes the project Highly Adaptable and Trustworthy Software using Formal Methods (HATS).
Abstract
Software systems are central for the infrastructure of modern society. To justify the huge investments such systems need to live for decades. This requires software which is highly adaptable. Software systems must support a high degree of spatial variability to accommodate a range of requirements and operating conditions, and temporal evolvability to allow these parameters to change over time.
Current approaches to reusability and maintenance are inadequate to cope with the dynamics and longevity of future software applications and infrastructures, e.g. for e-commerce, e-health and e-government. At the same time, we rely increasingly on systems that provide a high degree of trustworthiness. The major challenge facing software construction in the next decades is high adaptability combined with trustworthiness.
A severe limitation of current development practices is the missing rigor of models and property specifications. Without a formal notation of distributed, component-based systems it is impossible to achieve automation for consistency checking, enforcement of security, generation of trustworthy code, etc. Furthermore, it does not suffice to simply extend current formal approaches. We propose to take an empirically successful, yet informal software development paradigm and put it on a formal basis.
Specifically, in HATS we will turn software product family (SWPF) development into a rigorous approach. The technical core of the project is an Abstract Behavioral Specification language which will allow precise description of SWPF features and components and their instances. The main project outcome is a methodological and tool framework achieving not merely far-reaching automation in maintaining dynamically evolving software, but an unprecedented level of trust while informal processes are replaced with rigorous analyses based on formal semantics.
Members
- Prof. Dr. Reiner Hähnle, Chalmers Tekniska Högskola, Sweden
- Wolfgang Ahrendt, Ph.D., Chalmers Tekniska Högskola, Sweden
- Assoc. Prof. Dr. Einar Broch Johnsen, Universitetet i Oslo, Norway
- Assoc. Prof. Dr. Martin Steffen, Universitetet i Oslo, Norway
- Assoc. Prof. Mads Dam, Ph.D., Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, Sweden
- Dilian Gurov, Ph.D., Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, Sweden
- Prof. Karl Meinke, Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, Sweden
- Assoc. Prof. Dr. Germán Puebla, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
- Prof. Gilles Barthe, Ph.D., IMDEA Software, Spain
- Prof. Manuel Hermenegildo, Ph.D., Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and IMDEA Software, Spain
- Assoc. Prof. Elvira Albert, Ph.D., Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
- Assoc. Prof. Puri Arenas, Ph.D., Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
- Prof. Dr. Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter, AG Softwaretechnik, TU Kaiserslautern
- Prof. Davide Sangiorgi, Ph.D., Università di Bologna, Italy
- Prof. Cosimo Laneve, Ph.D., Università di Bologna, Italy
- Prof. Frank de Boer, Ph.D., Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, the Netherlands
- Dr. Bjarte Østvold, Norsk Regnesentral, Norway
- Dr. Anders Moen Hagalisletto, Norsk Regnesentral, Norway
- Nikolay Diakov, Ph.D., Fredhopper, the Netherlands
- Dirk Muthig, Ph.D., Fraunhofer-IESE
- Prof. Dave Clarke, Ph.D., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
- Prof. Dr. Frank Piessens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
- Prof. Tarmo Uustalu, Ph.D., Tallinna Tehnikaülikooli Küberneetika Instituut, Estonia
- Dr. Peeter Laud, Tallinna Tehnikaülikooli Küberneetika Instituut, Estonia
Researchers in AG Softwaretechnik
Funding
The project is funded under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission within the Future and Emerging Technologies scheme.
Completion Status
The project started in March 2009 and completed in February 2013 with the predicate “excellent progress”. Yannick Welsch completed his Ph.D. defense in August 2013. Ilham Kurnia completed his Ph.D. defense in January 2015.
Project Homepage
The project homepage can be found here.