The demands placed on programmers by the needs of safety-critical systems mandate the use of formal methods, supported by an integrated toolkit, throughout software development. Many formal speciication, design and veriication techniques have been proposed in the past. As the next step in the maturation of these techniques we are aiming to integrate previously disparate methods. Our overall met...

In this paper we describe how an agent’s trust is a combination of the trust in the other agent and the trust in the control mechanisms. The trust an agent has in the control mechanisms depends on the agent’s understanding of the control mechanism. Therefore, we describe how this understanding can be analyzed using formal methods.

We develop and analyze a class of overlapping domain decomposition (DD) preconditioners for linear-quadratic elliptic optimal control problems. Our preconditioners utilize the structure of the optimal control problems. Their execution requires the parallel solution of subdomain linear-quadratic elliptic optimal control problems, which are essentially smaller subdomain copies of the original pro...

The problem of specifying a radio-based railway level crossing control system is described. It is used within the DFG-supported Priority Programme \Software Speciication" as a comparison case study for a number of participating research projects and shall ooer realistic problems from the traac control systems domain. The remainder of the paper deals with the necessity to combine the beneets of ...

This paper proposes a system-wide optimal resource dispatch strategy that enables a shift from a primarily energy cost-based approach, to a strategy using simultaneous price signals for energy, power and ramping behavior. A formal method to compute the optimal sub-hourly power trajectory is derived for a system when the price of energy and ramping are both significant. Optimal control functions...

This article presents a formal method that enables to design a logic control system from specifications given in natural language. The aim of the proposed method is to prevent designer's faults coming from specifications misinterpretation. A significant part of the article is devoted to the presentation of the formal framework that underlies this formal design method: the algebra II. The operat...

We present a specification approach of secured systems as transition systems and security policies as constraints that guard the transitions. In this context, security properties are expressed as invariants. Then we propose an abduction algorithm to generate possible security policies for a given transition-based system. Because abduction is guided by invariants, the generated security policies...