In recent years, formal methods have been used as an important tool for performance evaluation and verification of a wide range of systems. In the view points of engineers and practitioners, however, there are still some major difficulties in using formal methods. In this paper, we introduce a new formal modeling language to fill the gaps between object-oriented programming languages (OOPLs) us...

In recent years, formal methods have been used as an important tool for performance evaluation and verification of a wide range of systems. In the view points of engineers and practitioners, however, there are still some major difficulties in using formal methods. In this paper, we introduce a new formal modeling language to fill the gaps between object-oriented programming languages (OOPLs) us...

For efficiency and cost control reasons, system designers’ will is to use an integrated set of methods and tools to describe specifications and design, and also to perform dependability analyses. The SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) AADL (Architecture Analysis and Design Language) has proved to be efficient for architectural modeling. We present a modeling framework allowing the generation...

We present a case study of performance and dependability evaluation of fault-tolerant multiprocessors. A distributed shared-memory multiprocessor architecture providing faulttolerance is analyzed taking into account system functionalities, actual workloads, failures of system components as well as the inter-component dependences. Since the evaluation of such a complex system has to be performed...

The size and complexity of software in spacecraft is increasing exponentially, and this trend complicates its validation within the context of the overall spacecraft system. Current validation methods are labour-intensive as they rely on manual analysis, review and inspection. In this paper we give an overview of an integrated system-software co-engineering approach focusing on a coherent set o...

The Intensive Care Unit is a complex, data-intensive and critical environment in which the adoption of Information Technology is growing. As physicians become more dependent on the computing technology to support decisions, raise real-time alerts and notifications of patient-specific conditions, this software has strong dependability requirements. The dependability challenges are expressed in t...

Cloud computing is an evolving computing paradigm in which computing is provided to consumers upon request as a service and is charged on pay-as-you-go basis. The virtually infinite computing resources on the cloud provider side and the dramatic decrease of investment requirement on the consumer side have made large companies to consider outsourcing their IT services to cloud providers. But, la...

A model-based evaluation of a system’s design often considers to what degree components need to be available multiple times in order to reach a desired level of availability, reliability or dependability. Multiple components of the same kind then lead to models with regular structures. In stochastic models, especially Markovian models, such regularities have been studied for a long time and are...