Fault Tolerant Systems Research Group

MOGENTES aims at significantly enhancing testing and verification of dependable embedded systems by means of automated generation of test cases relying on development of new approaches as well as innovative integration of state-of-the-art techniques. Driven by the needs of its industrial partners, it will address both testing of non-functional issues like reliability, e.g. by system stress and overload tests, and functional safety tests, meeting the requirements of standards such as IEC 61508, ISO WD 26262, or AUTOSAR. MOGENTES will demonstrate that different domains with a wide variety of requirements can significantly benefit from a common model-based approach for achieving automated generation of efficient test cases and for verifying system safety correctness using formal methods and fault injection, as this approach increases system development productivity while achieving predictable system dependability properties. For that purpose, proof-of-concept demonstrations will show the applicability of the developed technologies in two application domains: railway and automotive.
In particular, MOGENTES aims at the application of these technologies in large industrial systems, simultaneously enabling application domain experts (with rather little knowledge and experience in usage of formal methods) to use them with minimal learning effort. All in all, MOGENTES will increase knowledge and develop new techniques and tools in the area of verification and validation of dependable embedded systems which can be applied in model-based development processes also by non-experts in formal methods. Read more »

Service-oriented computing is an emerging paradigm where services are understood as autonomous, platform-independent computational entities that can be described, published, categorised, discovered, and dynamically assembled for developing massively distributed, interoperable, evolvable systems and applications. These characteristics pushed service-oriented computing towards nowadays widespread success, demonstrated by the fact that many large companies invested a lot of efforts and resources to promote service delivery on a variety of computing platforms, mostly through the Internet in the form of Web services. Tomorrow, there will be a plethora of new services as required for e-government, e-business, and e-science, and other areas within the rapidly evolving Information Society.
The aim of SENSORIA is to develop a novel comprehensive approach to the engineering of software systems for service-oriented overlay computers where foundational theories, techniques and methods are fully integrated in a pragmatic software engineering approach. It will focus on global services that are context adaptive, personalisable, and may require hard and soft constraints on resources and performance, and will take into account the fact that services have to be deployed on different, possibly interoperating, global computers, to provide novel and reusable service-oriented overlay computers. Read more »

The objective of the GENESYS project is to develop a cross-domain reference architecture for embedded systems that can be instantiated for different application domains to meet the requirements and constraints documented in the ARTEMIS strategic research agenda. These requirements are composability, networking, security, robustness, diagnosis, integrated resource management and evolvability. The reference architecture will address common issues, such as complexity management, separation of communication and computation, support for different levels of quality of service, security, model-based design, heterogeneity of subsystems, legacy integration, optimal power usage, and diagnosis. It will provide domain-independent services that can be customized to the needs of a particular application domain. Domain-specific platform services will be converged such that components from different application domains can be consistently integrated while preserving relevant properties.
The project will result in a conceptualization of the cross-domain architecture, a specification of cross-domain core services and optional services for the selected application domains, and four exploratory prototypes that will demonstrate and help to evaluate the feasibility of selected central architectural concepts in the different application domains.  Read more »

HIDENETS - a Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) in the European 6th Framework Program running in the period from January 2006 to March 2009. It developed and analyzed end-to-end resilience solutions for distributed applications and mobility-aware services in car-to-car communication scenarios with infrastructure service support.

Thereby, the concept of resilience extends the classical notion of fault tolerance, usually applied to recover system functions in spite of operational faults, to some level of adaptability, so as to be able to cope with system evolution and unanticipated conditions. Main results of HIDENETS are: (1) Design and evaluation of a run-time resilience support via a set of middleware and communication level functions; (2) A holistic evaluation framework for quantitative analysis of dependability properties of HIDENETS-like applications in highly mobile settings; (3) Design methodologies and tool support for the development and testing of resilient applications on top of the HIDENETS middleware; (4) Prototype implementation and evaluation acting as proof-of-concept of key aspects of the HIDENETS solutions; (5) Dissemination material including a detailed tutorial of over 900 slides. The HIDENETS solutions contribute to a user perception of trustworthiness of future wireless services, as this perception is strongly impacted by availability and resilience aspects. Such perception is critical for the technical and business success of these services.
The solution development and analysis required a holistic approach combining aspects of communications, middleware, service deployment and access. Hence the research work combined forces from the engineering community and from leading research teams on resilient distributed systems. Read more »