Verification and Software Engineering

The growing pervasiveness of computerised systems makes our society vulnerable to faults or attacks on such systems. Rigorous software engineering methods and supporting efficient verification tools are crucial to counter this threat.

Objectives and synergies

The objectives are

to develop rich mathematically rigorous modelling and analysis frameworks for the behaviour of complex distributed software systems. The frameworks should allow functional correctness, resource efficient and security aspects – as well as their tradeoffs – to be captured and analysed,
to develop and implement supporting verification and analysis tools that scale to the growing complexity software systems, and
transfer of frameworks and tools into industrially used development practice.

The research within Verification and Software Engineering complements and exploits techniques from other research themes. In particular, verification may be applied establish security properties of Secure Multiparty Computations of Blockchains as found in the Cybersecurity and Blockchain theme as already demonstrated by the Center for Program Verification. The dependability and robustness of several CPS and IoT-based systems may be established by Verification and Software Engineering methods.

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly exploited to accelerate and scale current verification techniques. Dually, machine-learned components, such as Deep Neural Networks, are challenging existing algorithmic techniques for verification with exciting research emerging these days towards verifiable and explainable AI.

Workstream Manager