Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR-DFG Project SMArT

Participants : Haniel Barbosa, Pascal Fontaine, Marek Košta, Stephan Merz, Thomas Sturm.

The SMArT (Satisfiability Modulo Arithmetic Theories) project is funded by ANR-DFG Programmes blancs 2013, a program of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche and the (German) Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG. It started in April 2014. The project gathers members of VeriDis in Nancy and Saarbrücken, and the Systerel company. The objective of the SMArT project is to provide advanced techniques for arithmetic reasoning beyond linear arithmetic for formal system verification, and particularly for SMT. The results feed back into the implementations of Redlog (section 6.2) and veriT (section 6.5), which also serve as experimentation platforms for theories, techniques and methods designed within this project.

More information on the project can be found on http://smart.gforge.inria.fr/.

ANR Project IMPEX

Participants : Souad Kherroubi, Dominique Méry.

The ANR Project IMPEX, within the INS program, started in December 2013 for 4 years. It is coordinated by Dominique Méry, the other partners are IRIT/ENSEIHT, Systerel, Supelec, and Telecom Sud Paris. The work reported here also included a cooperation with Pierre Castéran from LaBRI Bordeaux.

Modeling languages provide techniques and tool support for the design, synthesis, and analysis of the models resulting from a given modeling activity, as part of a system development process. These languages quite successfully focused on the analysis of the designed system exploiting the expressed semantic power of the underlying modeling language. The semantics of this modeling languages are well understood by the system designers and the users of the modeling language, i.e. the semantics is implicit in the model. In general, modeling languages are not equipped with resources, concepts or entities handling explicitly domain engineering features and characteristics (domain knowledge) underlying the modeled systems. Indeed, the designer has to explicitly handle the knowledge resulting from an analysis of this application domain [49], i.e. explicit semantics. Nowadays, making explicit the domain knowledge inside system design models does not obey any methodological rules validated by practice. The users of modeling languages introduce these domain knowledge features through types, constraints, profiles, etc. Our claim is that ontologies are good candidates for handling explicit domain knowledge. They define domain theories and provide resources for uniquely identifying domain knowledge concepts. Therefore, allowing models to make references to ontologies is a modular solution for models to explicitly handle domain knowledge. Overcoming the absence of explicit semantics expression in the modeling languages used to specify systems models will increase the robustness of the designed system models. Indeed, the axioms and theorems resulting from the ontologies can be used to strengthen the properties of the designed models. The objective [11] is to offer rigorous mechanisms for handling domain knowledge in design models.

Inria IPL HAC SPECIS

Participants : Marie Duflot-Kremer, Stephan Merz.

The goal of the HAC SPECIS (High-performance Application and Computers: Studying PErformance and Correctness In Simulation) project is to answer methodological needs of HPC application and runtime developers and to allow studying real HPC systems with respect to both correctness and performance. To this end, this Inria Project Lab assembles experts from the HPC, formal verification, and performance evaluation communities.

HAC SPECIS started in 2016. VeriDis contributes through its expertise in formal verification techniques. In particular, our goal is to extend the functionalities of exhaustive and statistical model checking within the SimGrid platform.

Inria Technological Development Action CUIC

Participants : Jasmin Christian Blanchette, Simon Cruanes.

Most “theorems” initially given to a proof assistant are incorrect, whether because of a typo, a missing assumption, or a fundamental flaw. Novices and experts alike can enter invalid formulas and find themselves wasting hours, or even days, on an impossible proof. This project, funded by Inria and running from 2015 to 2017, supports the development of a counterexample generator for higher-order logic. This new tool, called Nunchaku (cf. section 6.1), will be integrated in various proof assistants, including Isabelle, Coq, and the TLA⁺ Proof System. The project is coordinated by Jasmin Blanchette and also involves Inria Saclay (Toccata group) and Inria Rennes (Celtique group), among others. Simon Cruanes was hired in October 2015 and has started the development of Nunchaku, whereas Blanchette has developed an Isabelle frontend. Three releases have taken place so far, and the tool is an integral part of the Isabelle2016-1 official release. Work has started on Coq and TLAPS frontends. The tool is described in a conference publication [33] and was presented at a workshop [28].

Inria ADT PLM (2014-2016)

Participant : Matthieu Nicolas.

Joint work with Gérald Oster (project-team Coast, Inria Nancy – Grand Est) and Martin Quinson (project-team Myriads, Inria Rennes – Bretagne Atlantique)

The goal of this project is to establish an experimental platform for studying the didactics of informatics, specifically centered on introductory programming courses.

The project builds upon a pedagogical platform for supervising programming exercises developed for our own teaching, and improves this base in several ways. We want to provide more adapted feedback to the learners, and gather more data to better understand how beginners learn programming.

This year, we finalized the web version of our framework, and submitted several project applications to pursue this work in the future. Unfortunately, none of these applications have been accepted so far. Martin Quinson invited Peter Hubwieser, professor of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and specialist of the didactics of Computer Science, for two weeks in November. Developing the PLM and exploiting the data already gathered were central elements of this work meeting. A joint publication is currently prepared, targeting the ItiCSE'17 conference.