Section: Application Domains
Towards New Application Domains
Web Services
Driven by rapidly changing requirements and business needs, IT systems and applications are undergoing a paradigm shift: components are replaced by services, distributed over the network, and composed and reconfigured dynamically in a demand-driven way into service-oriented architectures (see e.g. http://osoa.org/display/Main/Service+Component+Architecture+Home ). Exposing services in future network infrastructures means a wide range of trust and security issues need to be adressed. Solving them is extremely hard since making the service components trustworthy is not sufficient: composing services leads to new subtle and dangerous vulnerabilities due to interference between component services and policies, the shared communication layer, and application functionality. Thus, one needs validation of both the service components and their composition into secure service architectures. In this context, there is an obvious need of applying formal methods. Our project aims at applying our proof and constraint solving techniques to reason on web services. More precisely, we plan to focus on the composition problem in the presence of security policies.
Microrobotics
Researchers in microrobotics have recently proposed the concept of a distributed and integrated micromanipulator called smart surface , based on an array of smart micromodules in order to realize an automated positioning and conveying surface. Each micro-module will be composed of a micro-actuator, a micro-sensor and a control unit. The cooperation of these micromodules will allow to recognize the parts and to control micro-actuators on order to move and position accurately the parts on the smart surface.
Our objective is to elaborate new specification languages and verification methods to validate distributed smart surfaces at different levels of abstraction. We will bring our experience in formal verification, more especially in regular model-checking (RMC).
We collaborate with the AS2M (Automatique et Systèmes Micro-Mécatroniques) department at the FEMTO-ST (Franche-Comté Electronique Mecanique Thermique et Optique - Sciences et Technologies) institute (UMR 6174) on verifying and validating an adaptative microfactory model they have developed. We have defined a complete information model of multi-cells microfactories in UML. This model is used as the communication basis between the robotic and computing researchers. It includes the structure of the physical components of the microfactory - cells and transports functions - and the logical components - information gathering and exchange. The next step will be to provide properties and a dynamic model of microfactories.
