DEGAS at Edinburgh

Computers and the networks which link them have become ubiquitous, and as a result new forms of applications are being developed to take advantage of the opportunities this offers. However, as yet, scientific investigation of tools to support this development has been limited. The Commission of the European Union has recent launched the Global Computing pro-active initiative within the Future and Emerging Technologies part of the Information Society Technologies programme. This initiative funds several projects to begin on January 1st 2002, of which Design Environment for Global Applications (DEGAS) (IST-2001-32072) is one.

This is the local Edinburgh DEGAS page: there is also a main DEGAS page.

Project abstract

DEGAS aims to combine structured (semi-formal) graphical methods for specification of global applications with formal methods for their analysis and verification. We will investigate the extent to which UML is already suitable to model global applications and we will propose extensions. We will establish formal models of these applications based on the operational semantics of foundational process calculi for mobility. Our development of static and dynamic analysis will concentrate on two key-features of global computing: performance prediction and security. We will assess the foundational work in a prototypical proof-of-concept environment that hides the formal treatment from the user when possible. We will tune our development by undertaking case-studies on wireless telecommunication applications.

Partners

Academic

University of Trento (Co-ordinating site)
Technical University of Denmark.
University of Pisa.
University of Edinburgh.

Industrial

Motorola
Omnys (And here is Omnys' DEGAS page in Italian)

Edinburgh's role

The people working on DEGAS in Edinburgh will be Stephen Gilmore, Jane Hillston and Perdita Stevens (site leader), and two research fellows, Catherine Canevet and one other to be appointed. There are two strands to Edinburgh's main contribution to the project:

UML for global applications and associated tool support. Based on discussions with the partners we will define a UML profile - that is, a dialect of UML defined in a standard way - for the design of global applications. We will also lead the development of the architecture for the toolset. We hope to use a standard UML tool as a front end, connected via XMI based extractors to formal tools as the backend.
The dynamic characteristics of global applications are influenced by both the computational and communication aspects of the systems. However timely behaviour is crucial for many applications and thus it is essential that support for performance prediction should be included in any design environment. We will seek to define formal modelling constructs which reflect the UML profile of global applications. These constructs will be used to automatically derive stochastic models suitable for performance analysis. Moreover we will seek to exploit these constructs in an investigation of efficient solution techniques and data structures for carrying out the analysis.

Here is a page about a very tiny demonstrator relevant to both strands.