Section: Research Program

Axis 3: Population models

We want to step up our effort in parameterized verification of systems consisting of many identical components, so-called population models. In a nutshell our objectives summarize as "from Boolean to quantitative".

Inspired by our experience on the analysis of populations of yeasts, we aim at developping the quantitative analysis and control of population models, e.g. using Markov decision processes together with quantitative properties, and focusing on generating strategies with fast convergence.

As for broadcast networks, the challenge is to model the mobility of nodes (representing mobile ad hoc networks) in a faithful way. The obtained model should reflect on the one hand, the placement of nodes at a given time instant, and on the other hand, the physical movement of nodes over time. In this context, we will also use game theory techniques which allows one to study cooperative and conflictual behaviors of the nodes in the network, and to synthesize correct-by-design systems in adversarial environments.

As a new application area, we target randomized distributed algorithms. Our goal is to provide probabilistic variants of threshold automata  [39] to represent fault-tolerant randomized distributed algorithms, designed for instance to solve the consensus problem. Most importantly, we then aim at developing new parameterized verification techniques, that will enable the automated verification of the correctness of such algorithms, as well as the assessment of their performances (in particular the expected time to termination).

In this axis, we will investigate whether fluid model checking and mean-field approximation techniques apply to our problems. More generally, we aim at a fruitful cross-fertilizing of these approaches with parameterized model-checking algorithms.