Verified Emulation of Legacy Mission Computer Systems. Processor obsolescence is a serious maintenance problem for long-lived computer control systems in military aircraft and other critical applications. A promising solution is to interpose an emulator program between the original "legacy" software and a replacement processor. Unfortunately, no techniques exist for accurately verifying that this procedure preserves the original system's functional and timing behaviour. A particular challenge ....Verified Emulation of Legacy Mission Computer Systems. Processor obsolescence is a serious maintenance problem for long-lived computer control systems in military aircraft and other critical applications. A promising solution is to interpose an emulator program between the original "legacy" software and a replacement processor. Unfortunately, no techniques exist for accurately verifying that this procedure preserves the original system's functional and timing behaviour. A particular challenge is that processor emulations involve both legacy code and new subroutines, written in different programming languages. This project will enable verification of safety and mission-critical emulated systems by devising a multilingual modelling and reasoning formalism, based on program refinement theory.Read moreRead less
GriddLeS: Building Grid Applications from Legacy Software. Grid computing is emerging as a major new capability for modern, high performance technical computing. Such Grids couple geographically distributed resources such as high performance computers, workstations, clusters, and scientific instruments. Traditional methods of producing software for Grids are inefficient and error prone, and will not allow the rapid deployment of new applications. This project concerns the development of a tool t ....GriddLeS: Building Grid Applications from Legacy Software. Grid computing is emerging as a major new capability for modern, high performance technical computing. Such Grids couple geographically distributed resources such as high performance computers, workstations, clusters, and scientific instruments. Traditional methods of producing software for Grids are inefficient and error prone, and will not allow the rapid deployment of new applications. This project concerns the development of a tool that will facilitate the construction of complex Grid application using legacy software components. It will test the new ideas with a range of scientific demonstrators, including atmospheric science, geo-science and mechanical engineering.Read moreRead less
Analysing model transformations for combinatorial problems. Maximising the benefits of limited resources is crucial for our industry, our hospitals, our security and our environment. This is achievable through a technology called combinatorial optimisation, which also supports wiser investment, better engineering, and even accelerated bio-informatics. Applying the technology is highly skilled and effort intensive, so most of its potential benefits are unrealised. This project will break down ....Analysing model transformations for combinatorial problems. Maximising the benefits of limited resources is crucial for our industry, our hospitals, our security and our environment. This is achievable through a technology called combinatorial optimisation, which also supports wiser investment, better engineering, and even accelerated bio-informatics. Applying the technology is highly skilled and effort intensive, so most of its potential benefits are unrealised. This project will break down some of the barriers which make it hard to use. The ultimate goal is to let the user state the problem in simple terms, and the computer work out how best to solve it. Our vision is for groups and organisations large and small to reap the benefits of combinatorial optimisation.Read moreRead less
Combining Time Bands and Teleo-Reactive Programs for Advanced Dependable Real-Time Systems. Society is becoming increasingly reliant on sophisticated real-time computer systems in applications ranging from car stability control to critical infrastructure, such as railway signalling systems. Further, there is a demand for ever greater automation and sophistication in the software controlling these systems. The research challenge in this project is to provide robust implementations of these system ....Combining Time Bands and Teleo-Reactive Programs for Advanced Dependable Real-Time Systems. Society is becoming increasingly reliant on sophisticated real-time computer systems in applications ranging from car stability control to critical infrastructure, such as railway signalling systems. Further, there is a demand for ever greater automation and sophistication in the software controlling these systems. The research challenge in this project is to provide robust implementations of these systems in a way that allows one assess their dependability.
Australia industry is actively working in these areas through companies like Ansaldo Australia, in automated railway systems, and Boeing Australia, in the defence sector.Read moreRead less
Derivation and timing analysis of concurrent real-time software. Safety-critical computer systems are commonly controlled by concurrent real-time software. Assurance of such systems requires rigorous methods for deriving the software and verifying its logical and timing correctness. This project will directly address this problem via a new paradigm for real-time programming that is based on a machine-independent concurrent real-time programming language, that explicitly represents timing deadlin ....Derivation and timing analysis of concurrent real-time software. Safety-critical computer systems are commonly controlled by concurrent real-time software. Assurance of such systems requires rigorous methods for deriving the software and verifying its logical and timing correctness. This project will directly address this problem via a new paradigm for real-time programming that is based on a machine-independent concurrent real-time programming language, that explicitly represents timing deadlines within programs. This allows a partitioning of the development process into a machine-independent phase that derives a program to meet a high-level specification, and a machine-dependent phase that checks that the timing deadlines within the generated machine code are guaranteed to be met.Read moreRead less
Compilation of Specifications. Computer software now controls critical systems worldwide. International standards require such programs to be produced from mathematically-precise specifications, but the techniques and tools involved are highly complex and unfamiliar to most programmers. This project will show how a tool already used by software developers, the program compiler, can be extended to undertake much of the task automatically. This will be done by devising a compilation strategy, b ....Compilation of Specifications. Computer software now controls critical systems worldwide. International standards require such programs to be produced from mathematically-precise specifications, but the techniques and tools involved are highly complex and unfamiliar to most programmers. This project will show how a tool already used by software developers, the program compiler, can be extended to undertake much of the task automatically. This will be done by devising a compilation strategy, based on program refinement theory, that automatically translates specification statements in programs into executable code. Such an outcome will ultimately improve the speed, accuracy and cost-effectiveness of critical software development.Read moreRead less
Open Agent Architectures for Intelligent Distributed Decision Making. Sophisticated software systems are part of the essential infrastructure of our daily lives. Complex systems such as the internet, finance, or telecommunications software cannot have a centralised point of control or a single developer. The aim of this project is to develop an architecture and support infrastructure enabling intelligent agents to locate and use services in such open systems. The fundamental questions that must ....Open Agent Architectures for Intelligent Distributed Decision Making. Sophisticated software systems are part of the essential infrastructure of our daily lives. Complex systems such as the internet, finance, or telecommunications software cannot have a centralised point of control or a single developer. The aim of this project is to develop an architecture and support infrastructure enabling intelligent agents to locate and use services in such open systems. The fundamental questions that must be addressed include issues such as how agents will find and use newly added services and how services will communicate with each other, given that they are developed independently.Read moreRead less
Refinement of Temporal and Epistemic Specifications in Asynchronous Systems. Designing distributed systems is a complex activity requiring rigorous mathematical models of designs and specifications. It is desirable for the mathematical notations to be as close as possible to intuitive notions used by designers. One such notion is the idea that components in a distributed system have states of knowledge. Previous work has developed a calculus enabling derivation of systems with global clock by s ....Refinement of Temporal and Epistemic Specifications in Asynchronous Systems. Designing distributed systems is a complex activity requiring rigorous mathematical models of designs and specifications. It is desirable for the mathematical notations to be as close as possible to intuitive notions used by designers. One such notion is the idea that components in a distributed system have states of knowledge. Previous work has developed a calculus enabling derivation of systems with global clock by series of correctness-preserving transformations from a knowledge-based specification. This project will generalize this work to a calculus for systems that lack a global clock, and implement a tool providing automated support for use of the calculus.Read moreRead less
Redesigning Typesetting for the Digital Age: Multilingual Layout on Multiple Media. We propose to create and develop a new model for character-level automatic typesetting, much more flexible than existing approaches. This model will support quality typesetting of all of the modern - and many ancient - languages and scripts, on media such as paper, computer screen, paper maps and online maps, for regular and safety-critical applications.
The fundamental innovations in this proposal are the us ....Redesigning Typesetting for the Digital Age: Multilingual Layout on Multiple Media. We propose to create and develop a new model for character-level automatic typesetting, much more flexible than existing approaches. This model will support quality typesetting of all of the modern - and many ancient - languages and scripts, on media such as paper, computer screen, paper maps and online maps, for regular and safety-critical applications.
The fundamental innovations in this proposal are the use of a tree-structured parameter space (generalization of Unix environment variables) and a multiple-pass approach to typesetting (as used in compilers). These innovative techniques will be integrated into computer software used worldwide.Read moreRead less
A scalable debugging framework for petascale computers. Supercomputing underpins a wide range of areas of importance to the Australian economy; mining, agriculture, engineering, medical research and pharmaceutical development to name a few. It is of critical importance that software solutions in these areas behave correctly and do not generate erroneous results. This project will develop software tools and techniques that make it possible to detect and locate errors as software is converted to r ....A scalable debugging framework for petascale computers. Supercomputing underpins a wide range of areas of importance to the Australian economy; mining, agriculture, engineering, medical research and pharmaceutical development to name a few. It is of critical importance that software solutions in these areas behave correctly and do not generate erroneous results. This project will develop software tools and techniques that make it possible to detect and locate errors as software is converted to run on the next generation of 'petascale' supercomputers. We will deploy the tools both commercially through our industry partner, and also on national high performance computing facilities.Read moreRead less