Abstraction and Automation for Reasoning about Complex Software

复杂软件推理的抽象和自动化

• 批准号: RGPIN-2015-06366
• 负责人: Chechik, Marsha
• 金额: $ 3.64万
• 依托单位: University of Toronto
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2018-01-01 至 2019-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=647296
• 关键词: Abstraction; Automation; Reasoning; about; Complex

Modern software development is a complex and messy business. Requirements are likely incomplete. New development uses complex existing libraries, tools and components that can fail. Multiple development teams proceed on different schedules, making it difficult to assure that their artifacts will "talk to each other" as intended. Every time a change is made, expensive quality assurance needs to be performed to ensure that software still does what it was supposed to. Such problems are made even more dire because many companies, especially in automotive, electronics, aerospace and defense domains, need to maintain families of software product variants with similar yet not identical functionality (e.g., supporting different types of customers and/or software platforms).***   I believe that many of the above problems can be aided by the availability of industrially scalable automated reasoning and analysis tools that enable users to answer essential questions about their artifacts. For example, they can determine the impact of a proposed change, ask "what if" questions about their designs, determine whether the different features are going to interact, check whether desired properties of a component would hold in any environment, etc. Creating such tools requires expertise both in formal verification and in software engineering, as many of the challenges are in improving usability of the analysis tools for SE practitioners, performing analysis at the "right" level of abstraction, enabling analysis earlier in the development lifecycle where complete information is not yet available, reusing results of analysis between product variants, etc.***   The goal of this project is to develop precise, effective and scalable automated techniques to solve a variety of complex software engineering problems. The emphasis will be on enabling analysis of artifacts with incomplete information, handling product lines, and analysis reuse. I intend to leverage my in-depth knowledge of verification tools such as model-checkers and static analyzers as well as strive to establish the right abstractions to facilitate reasoning. Success of this project will significantly expand the scope of applicability of automated reasoning and analysis in practice.**

现代软件开发是一项复杂而混乱的业务。要求可能不完整。新的开发使用复杂的现有库、工具和组件，可能会失败。多个开发团队按照不同的时间表进行，这使得很难保证他们的工件能够按照预期的那样“互相交谈”。每次进行更改时，都需要执行昂贵的质量保证，以确保软件仍然做它应该做的事情。这样的问题变得更加可怕，因为许多公司，特别是在汽车、电子、航空航天和国防领域，需要维护具有相似但不相同功能的软件产品变体系列（例如，支持不同类型的客户和/或软件平台）。* 我相信，上述许多问题可以通过工业可扩展的自动推理和分析工具的可用性来帮助解决，这些工具使用户能够回答关于他们的工件的基本问题。例如，他们可以确定拟议变更的影响，询问有关其设计的“如果”问题，确定不同功能是否会相互作用，检查组件的期望属性是否在任何环境中都能保持，等等。因为许多挑战在于为SE从业者改进分析工具的可用性，在“正确”的抽象级别执行分析，在开发生命周期的早期实现分析，其中完整的信息还不可用，在产品变体之间重复使用分析结果等 * 该项目的目标是开发精确，有效和可扩展的自动化技术来解决各种复杂的软件工程问题。重点将放在启用对具有不完整信息的工件的分析、处理产品线和分析重用上。我打算利用我对验证工具（如模型检查器和静态分析器）的深入了解，并努力建立正确的抽象来促进推理。该项目的成功将大大扩大自动推理和分析在实践中的适用范围。