Collaborative Research: Program Analysis Techniques to Support Dependable RTSJ Applications

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As part of the joint NSF/NASA High-Dependability Computing and CommunicationSystems Research effort, this project is developing, adapting and integrating a variety of program analysis techniques for the Real-timeSpecification for Java (RTSJ). RTSJ is an emerging language extensionfor Java that is designed for implementing concurrent time-criticalembedded software, for example, the control software on NASA'srobotic Mars rovers. This type of software is notoriously difficult totest and debug, and the model-checking, light-weight static and dynamicanalysis techniques being developed as part of this project promise toidentify bugs before software is deployed to the field and to producesystems that function more reliably.A cornerstone of this project is the use of controlled experimentation to judge the effectiveness of new analysis techniques. As part of this effort, RTSJ programs and experimental frameworks will be developed that supportrepeatable experimentation for determining analysis performance and the precision of analysis results. Experiment findings will drive the refinement ofanalysis techniques. Case studies using NASA testbed software will serveto evaluate the scalability and applicability to NASA-relevant softwarechallenges.If successful, this project promises to provide developers of next generation real-time embedded software, both at NASA and throughout the embeddedsystems domain, with a suite of powerful quality-assurance tools that will allow them to more cost-effectively produce higher-quality systems.Given the pace at which software is being embedded in our society'sinfra-structure, this could have broad impacts on the degree to which we can rely on such systems.