The TRUST project entitled "Trustworthy Software Design with Alloy" will be carried out at the University of Minho, under the responsibility of Alcino Cunha², one of HASLab's coordinators, along with two partners, namely the Queen Mary University of London (EECS-QMUL) and the National Office for Aerospace Studies and Research (ONERA).

The software design phase is crucial in order to achieve high quality systems that meet the necessary requirements, even when subjected to severe operating constraints. This is particularly important when dealing with critical software, such as in control of aircraft or even medical devices. In these cases, failure to comply with requirements can lead to catastrophic consequences.

This project aims to propose extensions and new tools for the Alloy language - one of the most popular languages for formal specification used in the software design phase - in order to simplify the specification and validation of requirements in complex critical systems.

The DaLí project entitled "Dynamic logics for cyber-physical systems: towards contract based design" will also be carried out at the University of Minho, and will count on the University of Aveiro as a partner. The researcher responsible for this project is Alexandre Madeira, a postdoctoral researcher of HASLab and winner of the 2013 IBM Award.

This project aims to define a methodology that is based on the use of dynamic logics for the design, modelling and verification of cyber-physical systems by using contracts as support to reliable component abstractions.

The kick-off of these two projects took place on 19 and 20 this month in the Department of Informatics of the University of Minho, and was attended by all members of the projects, including international partners and some consultants. 

More information on both projects can be found on their respective websites.

TRUST: http://trust.di.uminho.pt

DaLí: http://dali.di.uminho.pt

¹Funding will be ensured by ERDF funds, through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation (COMPETE 2020), and National Funds, through the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)

²Assistant Professor at the School of Engineering of the University of Minho