Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR Projects

PiCoq (ANR project)

Participant : Jean-Bernard Stefani.

The goal of the PiCoq project is to develop an environment for the formal verification of properties of distributed, component-based programs. The project's approach lies at the interface between two research areas: concurrency theory and proof assistants. Achieving this goal relies on three scientific advances, which the project intends to address:

• Finding mathematical frameworks that ease modular reasoning about concurrent and distributed systems: due to their large size and complex interactions, distributed systems cannot be analysed in a global way. They have to be decomposed into modular components, whose individual behaviour can be understood.

• Improving existing proof techniques for distributed/modular systems: while behavioural theories of first-order concurrent languages are well understood, this is not the case for higher-order ones. We also need to generalise well-known modular techniques that have been developed for first-order languages to facilitate formalisation in a proof assistant, where source code redundancies should be avoided.

• Defining core calculi that both reflect concrete practice in distributed component programming and enjoy nice properties w.r.t. behavioural equivalences.

The project partners include Inria (Celtique and Spades teams), LIP (Plume team), and Université de Savoie. The project runs from November 2010 to October 2014.

REVER (ANR project)

Participant : Jean-Bernard Stefani.

The REVER project aims to develop semantically well-founded and composable abstractions for dependable distributed computing on the basis of a reversible programming model, where reversibility means the ability to undo any program execution and to revert it to a state consistent with the past execution. The critical assumption behind REVER is that by combining reversibility with notions of compensation and modularity, one can develop systematic and composable abstractions for dependable programming.

The REVER work program is articulated around three major objectives:

• To investigate the semantics of reversible concurrent processes.

• To study the combination of reversibility with notions of compensation, isolation and modularity in a concurrent and distributed setting.

• To investigate how to support these features in a practical (typically, object-oriented and functional) programming language design.

The project partners are Inria (Focus and Spades teams), Université de Paris VII (PPS laboratory), and CEA (List laboratory). The project runs from December 2011 to November 2015.