Scientific publications

A Domain Specific Language (DSL) focuses on the essential concepts in a certain problem domain, thus abstracting from low-level implementation details. In combination with code generators, DSLs bring software development closer to domain requirements. The development of DSLs usually centers around the grammar and a code generator; there is little attention for the semantics of the DSL.

Exploration of design alternatives and estimation of their key performance metrics such as latency and energy consumption is essential for making the proper design decisions in the early phases of system development. Often, highlevel models of the dynamic behavior of the system are used for the analysis of design alternatives.

Nowadays the maritime operational picture is characterised by a growing number of entities whose interactions and activities are constantly changing. To provide timely support in this dynamic environment, automated systems need to be equipped with tools—lacking in existing systems—for real-time prioritisation of the application tasks (missions), selection and alignment of relevant information, and efficient reasoning at a situation level.

Using a well-known industrial case study from the verification literature, the bounded retransmission protocol, we show how active learning can be used to establish the correctness of protocol implementation I relative to a given reference implementation R. Using active learning, we learn a model M R of reference implementation R, which serves as input for a model-based testing tool that checks conformance of implementation I to M R .

Node mobility is a key feature of using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in many sensory applications, such as healthcare. The Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol should properly support the mobility in the network. In particular, mobility is complicated for contention-free protocols like Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA).

We report about experiences at Philips Healthcare with component-based development supported by formal techniques. The formal Analytical Software Design (ASD) approach of the company Verum has been incorporated into the industrial workflow. The commercial tool ASD:Suite supports both compositional verification and code generation for control components.

Analyzing worst-case application timing for systems with shared resources is difficult, especially when non-monotonic arbitration policies like First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) scheduling are used in combination with varying task execution times. Analysis methods that conservatively analyze these systems are often based on state-space exploration, which is not scalable due to its inherent susceptibility to combinatorial explosion.

Gossip-based Wireless Sensor Networks (GWSNs) are complex systems of inherently random nature. Planning and designing GWSNs requires a fast and adequately accurate mechanism to estimate system performance. As a first contribution, we propose a performance analysis technique that simulates the gossip-based propagation of each single piece of data in isolation.

This paper presents an approach to construct execution views, which are views that describe what the software of a software-intensive system does at runtime and how it does it. The approach represents an architecture reconstruction solution based on a metamodel, a set of viewpoints, and a dynamic analysis technique.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are commonly deployed in dynamic environments where events, such as moving sensor nodes and changing external interference, impact the performance, or Quality-of-Service (QoS), of the network. QoS is expressed by the values of multiple, possibly conflicting, network quality metrics, such as network lifetime and maximum latency of communicating a packet to the sink.