Peter Herrmann

Anna Zamansky, Maria Spichkova, Guillermo Rodriguez-Navas et al.

The use of lightweight formal methods (LFM) for the development of industrial applications has become a major trend. Although the term "lightweight formal methods" has been used for over ten years now, there seems to be no common agreement on what "lightweight" actually means, and different communities apply the term in all kinds of ways. In this paper, we explore the recent trends in the use of LFM, and establish our opinion that cost-effectiveness is the driving force to deploy LFM. Further, we propose a simple framework that should help to classify different LFM approaches and to estimate which of them are most cost-effective for a certain software engineering project. We demonstrate our framework using some examples.

Fenglin Han, Jan Olaf Blech, Peter Herrmann et al.

Using probabilities in the formal-methods-based development of safety-critical software has quickened interests in academia and industry. We address this area by our model-driven engineering method for reactive systems SPACE and its tool-set Reactive Blocks that provide an extension to support the modeling and verification of real-time behaviors. The approach facilitates the composition of system models from reusable building blocks as well as the verification of functional and real-time properties and the automatic generation of Java code. In this paper, we describe the extension of the tool-set to enable the modeling and verification of probabilistic real-time system behavior with the focus on spatial properties that ensure system safety. In particular, we incorporate descriptions of probabilistic behavior into our Reactive Blocks models and integrate the model checker PRISM which allows to verify that a real-time system satisfies certain safety properties with a given probability. Moreover, we consider the spatial implication of probabilistic system specifications by integrating the spatial verification tool BeSpaceD and give an automatic approach to translate system specifications to the input languages of PRISM and BeSpaceD. The approach is highlighted by an example.