Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

• Type: PEOPLE

• Instrument: International Research Staff Exchange Scheme

• Objective: Exchange of scientists between Europe and Argentina

• Duration: October 2011 - September 2015

• Coordinator: Holger Hermanns, Universität des Saarlandes (Germany)

• Partners: Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Universidad Nacional de Rio Cuarto, Instituto Tecnológico Buenos Aires

• Inria contact: Catuscia Palamidessi

• Abstract: The MEALS project funds exchanges between scientists in Europe (Saarland University, RWTH Aachen, TU Dresden, Inria, Imperial College, Univ. of Leicester, TU Eindhoven); it is structured in five work packages (Quantitative Analysis of Concurrent Program Behaviour, Reasoning Tasks for Specification and Verification, Security and Information Flow Properties, Synthesis in Model-based Systems Engineering, Foundations for the Elaboration and Analysis of Requirements Specifications). Our team mainly cooperates with the group led by Carlos Areces in Córdoba within work package 2. In 2014, the project funded visits by Stephan Merz to Córdoba and by Carlos Areces, Luciana Benotti, Raúl Fervari, and Guillaume Hoffmann to Nancy.

We cooperate with Rosemary Monahan of NUI Maynooth on exchanges between techniques of software refinement and software verification. Our cooperation was financially supported in 2013 by a one-year project funded by PHC Ulysses. The verification of software requires the specification of preconditions and postconditions as well as other properties of the code. These properties are expressed as annotations and provide a detailed understanding of how the software is implemented. In program verification, the annotation process is often done a posteriori, with verification tools used to check that annotations are sound according to the semantics of the program. Determining the correct annotations to provide a complete specification is difficult, especially when specifying invariant properties of the code. A priori techniques for developing correct software are based on the correct-by-construction paradigm. The refinement-based approach is such a technique, providing for the construction of a correct program through the step-by-step refinement of an initial high-level model of the software. In this way, the program specification is developed alongside the code, discharging the conditions that need to be proved. We focus on combining these two software engineering techniques, to benefit from the strengths of both. We have proposed a framework for integrating the a posteriori paradigm Spec# and the a priori paradigm Event-B. This integration induces a methodology that bridges the gap between software modeling and program verification in the software development life cycle. During 2014, we have designed the Rodin plugin EB2RC that implements transformations of Event-B models into algorithms.