Section: New Software and Platforms

Introduction

Software development is an essential part of the research done by HEPHAISTOS since a large part of our methods can only be validated experimentally (both for our numerical experiments and in robotics). Software developments follow various directions:

1. interval arithmetic: although we do not plan to work in this very specialized area (we generally rely on existing packages) interval arithmetic is an important part of our interval analysis algorithms and we may have to modify the existing packages so as to deal, in particular, with multi-precision and arithmetic extensions

2. interval analysis libraries: we daily use the ALIAS library that has been designed in the project and is still under development. A long term work is to develop a generic programming framework that allows for modularity and flexibility, with the objectives of testing new functionalities easily and building specific solvers by a simple juxtaposition of existing modules

3. interface to interval analysis: in our opinion interval analysis software must be available within general purpose scientific software (such as Maple , Mathematica ) and not only as a stand-alone tool. Indeed most end-users are reluctant to learn a new programming language just to solve problems that are only small elements of a more general problem. Furthermore interval analysis efficiency may benefit from the functionalities available in the general purpose scientific software.