Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

MEALS

• Title: Mobility between Europe and Argentina applying Logics to Systems

• Programm: FP7

• Duration: October 2011 - September 2015

• Coordinator: Université de la sarre

• Partners:

  • Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine (United Kingdom)

  • Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen (Germany)

  • Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (Netherlands)

  • Technische Universitaet Dresden (Germany)

  • University of Leicester (United Kingdom)

  • Universitaet Desarlandes (Germany)

• Inria contact: Castuscia Palamidessi

• Computing systems are getting ever more ubiquitous, making us dependent on their proper functioning. Therefore we require that they are correct (i.e. they conform their intended behavior), safe (i.e. its operation does not have catastrophic consequences), reliable, available to provide the intended service, and secure (i.e., no user without appropriate clearance can access or modify protected data). Guarantees for such charcteristics rely on rigid specification and analysis techniques for both the required system functionality as well as its behavior. Formal methods provide a mathematical approach to model, understand, and analyze systems, especially at early development stages. In this project we focus on three aspects of formal methods: specification, verification, and synthesis. We consider the study of both qualitative behavior and quantitative behavior (extended with probabilistic information). We aim to study formal methods in all their aspects: foundations (their mathematical and logical basis), algorithmic advances (the conceptual basis for software tool support) and practical considerations (tool construction and case studies). The MEALS project includes five tightly interconnected thematic work packages. They focus on quantitative analysis of concurrent program behaviour (WP1), reasoning tasks for specification and verification (WP2), security and information flow properties (WP3), synthesis in model-based systems engineering (WP4) and foundations for the elaboration and analysis of requirements specifications (WP5). The crosscutting concern of all these work packages is the development of formal techniques for the specification, verification and synthesis of dependable ubiquitous computing systems. Five carefully planned MEALS gatherings and workshops give the project an effectve structure for knowledge transfer, communitiy building, and result dissemination, aimed at a sustained transcontinental collaboration.