RiSE/SHiNE (2015-2019)

RiSE/SHiNE pursues the long term vision of a hardware/software system design process supported by automatic formal methods based on model checking, decision procedures, and game theory.

RiSE pursues the long term vision of a hardware/software system design process supported by automatic formal methods based on model checking, decision procedures, and game theory. Simultaneously, the National Research Network has the strategic goal to establish and strengthen Austria as an international hot spot in this research area. In the first three years of the 4-year funding period (Period I), we have made important steps towards both the scientific and the strategic goal. A key lesson from Period I was that non-functional aspects of system quality and correctness are critical, hard to achieve manually, and highly amenable to rigorous reasoning. We view the second period of RiSE 2015–2019 as an opportunity to position Computer Aided Verification closer to other fields of computer science which address non-functional aspects in a rigorous manner. In Period II, nine Project Part Leaders and six (mostly) junior Task Leaders will build upon the foundations established in the first years. The new Tasks that we propose either derive from a cross cutting “collaboration topic” of Period I or are new topics introduced by the recently hired faculty. All Tasks will be jointly investigated by two PIs. While the Research Clusters of Period I reflected the individual expertise of the PIs, we will now organize our Tasks along intersecting Research Lines. Each Research Line of Period II will address a non-functional aspect such as concurrency, probabilistic behavior, reliability, and quantitative measures (timing and resource consumption). This focus reflects a broader understanding of correctness beyond the Boolean notion of functional correctness that was central in Period I. Thus, our thrust will go beyond verification of functional specifications to computer aided design of programs that fulfill both functional and non-functional properties. We have therefore subtitled the second funding Period Systematic Methods in Systems Engineering, or SHiNE.

Task EBUS2: Modeling and Analysis of Parametric, Probabilistic and Parameterized Timed Systems (Ezio Bartocci).

To master the overwhelming complexity of manual correctness proofs of continuous-time distributed systems, computer-aided methods that can deal with symbolic timing parameters (“parametric”) and symbolic system sizes (“parameterized”) are required. Besides the question of how to deal with the overwhelming complexity, answering the question of how to incorporate (probabilistic) faults will be addressed in collaboration with PP12 (Grosu), PP07 (Chatterjee) and PP11 (Kirsch). In order to extend our framework to also cover message-passing distributed systems with parameterized system size, novel abstraction techniques and/or cutoff results will be developed in a collaboration with PP03 (Veith).