Expertise

Industrial context

Overall, both telecommunications and software are growth industries. Due to a significant lack of system developers and the imperative need to reduce production times, it has become for designers to have access to and use tools that allow, even partially, application designers to automate the development process.

Test activities represent close to 70% of total system development costs. As a result, CASE tools (based on formal methods) have become an important element in the development process. The industrial use of these tools is, in fact, constantly expanding.

Research context

General research in the field of formal methods has already led to numerous integrated environments supporting several specification languages, a variety of model checkers, as well as test generation tools offering a significant level of development activity automation. Based on the significant investments in research over the last 20 years, this trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

Discussions on the industrial application of formal methods have evolved from case studies to documented success stories and practical recommendations. This being said, future generations of tools used in the development of more complex applications will be contingent upon rigorous and effective methods that provide a high level of trust in the quality of resulting products. The Distributed Systems Analysis team at CRIM will contribute to the research and development of such methods.

Research topics

The research team is focusing on the following areas:

• Testing of parallel and distributed systems using model checkers
• Modeling, testing and validation of Web-based applications
• Static and dynamic analysis of multithread Java programs
• Quality assessment of object-oriented programs through the static analysis of source code.

Fields of application

The R&D team’s activities serve the specific interests of businesses involved in the development of distributed systems and their applications, Web-based applications and those using multithread programs, computer networks, telecommunication services, computer security systems and CASE tools.