Project-Team : triskell

Section: Application Domains

Keywords: telecommunication, distributed systems, software engineering, test, UML.

Software for Telecommunication and large Distributed Systems

In large scaled distributed systems such as developed for telecommunications, building a new application from scratch is no longer possible. There is a real need for flexible solutions allowing to deal at the same time with a wide range of needs (product lines modeling and methodologies for managing them), while reducing the time to market (such as derivation and validation tools).

Triskell has gained experience in model engineering, and finds here a propitious domain. The increasing software complexity and the reliability and reusability requirements fully justify the methods developed by our project. The main themes studied are reliable software components composition, UML-based developments validation, and test generation from UML models, iether at requirement level or at design level.

The research activity in Triskell focuses at the same time on development efficiency and reliability. Our main applications mainly concern reliable construction of large scale communicating software, and object oriented systems testing.

Reliability is an essential requirement in a context where a huge number of softwares (and sometimes several versions of the same program) may coexist in a large system. On one hand, software should be able to evolve very fast, as new features or services are frequently added to existing ones, but on the other hand, the occurrence of a fault in a system can be very costly, and time consuming. A lot of attention should then be paid to interoperability, i.e. the ability for software to work properly with other. We think that formal methods may help solving this kind of problems. Note that formal methods should be more and more integrated in an approach allowing system designer to build software globally, in order to take into account constraints and objectives coming from user requirements.

Software testing is another aspect of reliable development. Testing activities mainly consist in ensuring that a system implementation conforms to its specifications. Whatever the efforts spent for development, this phase is of real importance to ensure that a system behaves properly in a complex environment. We also put a particular emphasis on on-line approaches, in which test and observation are dynamically computed during execution.