Model Driven Incremental Design and Validation of Software Systems

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Software systems are pervasive. They are part of our daily life, they control cars, airplanes, telecommunications networks and services and other home appliances. They are very complex, because of their inherent characteristics: large size, embedded, distribution, concurrency, real-time constraints and deadlines. Such systems require usage of rigorous and formal methods in order to ensure their functional correctness and other non-functional qualities such as real-timeliness. Model Driven Development (MDD) is an approach that has emerged over the last two decades, and which is gaining in momentum. However, the adoption and the application of MDD is hindered by the challenging issues of scalability and formality.****The focus of MDD, so far, has been on developing profiles, extending/specializing the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and languages for transformations, only a few techniques have been proposed for its realization. Moreover, these techniques do not span the necessary phases to link and relate the various artifacts and phases, do not scale or are not formal. The main objective of this research proposal is therefore to contribute to the MDD of complex software systems with techniques for their modeling, design and validation. We propose to investigate a modeling framework that covers several phases of the development process: requirements, design, and validation/testing. The modeling framework will consist of a subset of UML 2 and related profiles like MARTE, SysML and UML Profile for Testing (UPT). Using this formalized framework, we aim at devising MDD compliant techniques for the incremental design and validation of software systems. Incremental design approaches taking into account functional and non-functional characteristics as well as incremental test case generation techniques will be devised. These formal incremental techniques will certainly scale and will contribute to the application and adoption of MDD.****This proposal aims at devising techniques for improving the quality of software systems and at reducing their development cost. The research issues tackled in this proposal are of high importance for the software research community and industry which includes the telecommunications and automobile sectors. The proposed research program will train graduate students who will join the Canadian work force and contribute to the Canadian economy in different sectors.*********