ITR: Design Conformant Software

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed research will investigate new software engineering techniques and tools for infrastructural software that will improve its reliability, safety, and predictability. The key idea is to use abstract design models to drive new static analyses that check that the software correctly implements its design (and if not, identify the source of the problem). To ensure that our research addresses the important issues that developers face in the field, we will conduct our research in the context of the development of an air traffic control system component. Specifically, the research will investigate the use of object models to express important design properties and new pointer analysis algorithms to verify that the code correctly implements the object models. Object models describe essential object in the heap and the relationships between them; pointer analysis automatically analyzes code to extract information about how objects refer to each other. The research will investigate techniques that improve the precision of the pointer analysis by using the object model to focus the analysis on the properties of interest.