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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

FP7 project MEALS

  • 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)

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

  • Inria contact: Castuscia 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, as well with Diego Garbervetsky in Buenos Aires, within work package 2. In 2013, the project funded visits by Luciana Benotti, Rodrigo Castaño, Raúl Fervari, and Guillaume Hoffmann.

Cooperation with TU Wien, Austria

Participants : Pascal Fontaine, Stephan Merz.

This project – from January 2012 to December 2013 – fosters bilateral cooperation with the team headed by Prof. Alexander Leitsch at TU Vienna. It focuses on aspects of proof production and proof compression in automated reasoning. It is headed by Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo of TU Wien, who was formerly a post-doctoral researcher in VeriDis until March 2011, and Pascal Fontaine. The project is funded by the Amadeus Programme of the Partenariat Hubert Curien and the Österreichischer Austausch Dienst.

The project funded the traveling costs for the participants for four one-week workshops in Vienna and Nancy. In particular, the third workshop was affiliated to Tableaux 2013 and was open to the participants of Tableaux; it attracted around 40 participants. The final workshop of the project took place in November 2013 in Vienna.

The discussions involved many aspects on proofs and allowed to improve some aspects of proof production in SMT, as well as several proof handling tools (e.g. Skeptik), developed among others at TU Wien. The web page gives more information on this project.

Cooperation with NUI Maynooth, Ireland

Participant : Dominique Méry.

The project Building Reliable Systems: Software Refinement meets Software Verification is a one-year project funded by PHC Ulysses. The academic Irish partner is Dr Rosemary Monahan of NUI Maynooth. 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 providing 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 [18] for integrating a representation of the a posteriori paradigm, namely Spec#, and a representation of the a priori paradigm, namely Event B. This integration induces a methodology which bridges the gap between software modeling and program verification in the software development life cycle.