The polychronous or multi-clock paradigm is adequate to model large distributed systems where achieving a full timed synchronization is not only very costly but also often not necessary. It concerns systems made of a set of components with loose ...

The communities of blockchains and distributed ledgers have been stirred up by the introduction of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). Originally designed as a solution to privacy issues, ZKPs have now evolved into an effective remedy for scalability concerns. ...

Class invariants—consistency constraints preserved by every operation on objects of a given type—are fundamental to building, understanding, and verifying object-oriented programs. For verification, however, they raise difficulties, which have not yet ...

Runtime Assertion Checking (RAC) for expressive specification languages is a non-trivial verification task that becomes even more complex for memory-related properties of imperative languages with dynamic memory allocation. It is important to ensure the ...

Automata learning enables model-based analysis of black-box systems by automatically constructing models from system observations, which are often collected via testing. The required testing budget to learn adequate models heavily depends on the applied ...

ARINC 653 as the de facto standard of partitioning operating systems has been applied in many safety-critical domains. The multi-core version of ARINC 653, ARINC 653 Part 1-4 (Version 4), provides support for services to be utilized with a module that ...

Recent years brought popularity and importance of complex event processing (CEP) and associated query languages. CEP systems can be hard to understand. It is often non-trivial to determine streams of events matched by a query, and sometimes we may not ...

Static analyses based on typestates are important in certifying correctness of code contracts. Such analyses rely on Deterministic Finite Automata (DFAs) to specify properties of an object. We target the analysis of contracts in low-latency environments, ...

Hash maps are a common and important data structure in efficient algorithm implementations. Despite their wide-spread use, real-world implementations are not regularly verified.

In this article, we present the first case study of the IdentityHashMap class ...

Universal quantifiers occur frequently in proof obligations produced by program verifiers, for instance, to axiomatize uninterpreted functions and to statically express properties of arrays. SMT-based verifiers typically reason about them via E-matching, ...

We consider the almost-sure (a.s.) termination problem for probabilistic programs, which are a stochastic extension of classical imperative programs. Lexicographic ranking functions provide a sound and practical approach for termination of non-...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data are reshaping organizations and businesses. Human Resources (HR) management and talent development make no exception, as they tend to involve more automation and growing quantities of data. Because this brings ...

Automated model repair techniques enable machines to synthesise patches that ensure models meet given requirements. B-repair, which is an existing model repair approach, assists users in repairing erroneous models in the B formal method, but repairing ...

We consider the problem of estimating the numerical accuracy of programs with operations in fixed-point arithmetic and variables of arbitrary, mixed precision, and possibly non-deterministic value. By applying a set of parameterised rewrite rules, we ...

When developing file systems, caching is a common technique to achieve a performant implementation. Integrating write-back caches is not primarily a problem for functional correctness, but is critical for proving crash safety. Since parts of written data ...

In addition to the major UK contributions to research underpinning formal approaches to the specification and development of computer systems—and perhaps as a consequence of this—some significant attempts to deploy the ideas into practical environments ...

Kalman filters are widely used for estimating the state of a system based on noisy or inaccurate sensor readings, for example in the control and navigation of vehicles or robots. However, numerical instability or modelling errors may lead to ...

The system design process needs to cope with the increasing complexity and size of systems,motivating the replacement of labor intensivemanual techniques with automated and semi-automated approaches.Recently, formal methods techniques, such as ...

The functions of automobiles are becoming increasingly intelligent, which leads to the increasing number of electrical control units for one automobile. Hence, it makes software migration and extension more complicated. In order to avoid these ...