System Validation 2: Model Process Behavior
MCSAbout This Course
System Validation is the field that studies the fundamentals of system communication and information processing. It is the next logical step in computer science and improving software development in general. It enables automated analysis based on behavioral models of a system to determine if it functions correctly. We want to guarantee that the system does exactly what it is supposed to do. The techniques put forward in system validation allow for proving the absence of errors. It allows for the design embedded system behaviour that is structurally sound and, as a side effect, forces you to make the behaviour simple and insightful. This means that the systems are not only behaving correctly, but are also much easier to maintain and adapt.
’Model process behavior' is the follow-up course to 'Automata and behavioural equivalences'. This course shows you how to model process behavior, in particular protocols and distributed algorithms, dive deeper into the properties of system behavior, and keep things simple to avoid a state space explosion. Reading material. J.F. Groote and M.R. Mousavi. Modeling and analysis of communicating systems. The MIT Press, 2014.
Course Staff
Jan Friso Groote is a Full Professor and Chair of Formal Systems Analysis group in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His areas of expertise include Computer systems, architectures, software, algorithms, embedded systems and formal methods. Jan Friso has contributed to structural operational semantics and verification technology. His particular contributions include the tyft/tyxt format for operational rules, the first and also the most efficient algorithms to determine branching bisimulation and the cones and foci method to prove correctness of protocols and distributed algorithms. He is the founding father of the process modeling language and analysis tool set mCRL2. This tool set makes it possible to describe the behavior of software with data, time and probabilities, whilst proving properties related to this behavior, expressed in the modal mu-calculus, as well as reducing and visualizing this.
His current research goal is to show that formal analysis techniques can be used to design the software for complete systems. For this it is not only necessary to improve the verification techniques and algorithms, but it is also important to develop software development styles suitable for verification. Industrial experience shows that this reduces the development time with a factor three increasing the quality with a factor 10. Especially regarding the quality, it can be expected that substantial further improvements are possible, hopefully leading to zero defect software.