Reliability of Concurrent and Distributed Software

Description and Aim

Modern society depends heavily on the reliability of software. Reliability is crucial for for safety-critical software, but also to meet the customers' expectations for standard software. At the same time, we see that software is becoming increasingly complex: to efficiently exploit multiple cores, software must support concurrency; andt to efficiently exploit networked and virtualized platforms, software must support distribution and mobility.

While software reliability is essential for society, modern concurrent and distributed software is too complex to validate using traditional techniques such as code inspection and testing only. Therefore, a wide range of formal verification techniques is under development, which vary in efficiency, applicability and coverage: for an app it might be sufficient to ensure that it will never block; for aircraft control software its continuous correct functioning is essential.

Ideally, in the long-term, software developers should routinely verify and guarantee the reliability of concurrent and distributed software. To meet this goal, a leap in the maturity of verification techniques and tools is required. At the moment, there is a significant amount of on-going high quality research in this area, but this research is fragmented. This Workshop@Oort  will help to establish a much needed common forum for a diverse community involved in numerous national and European research projects. Today, multiple research projects independently focus on separate verification problems. To develop widely-applicable tools, many different problems will have to be addressed and many different techniques will have to be combined.

This workshop provides the opportunity to exchange and compare approaches, and to integrate solutions developed by other teams with existing techniques. This synergy will be essential to bring forward this leap to maturity, in order to better address the full scope of real-world software. We hope this meeting will be the first in a series of meetings to reach this overall goal.