DEPLOY

Project objectives

The overall objective of DEPLOY is to make major advances in the industrial practices of engineering for dependable systems, through the deployment of formal engineering methods and tools.

Industries are facing the challenges of mastering the development of ever more complex systems with ever higher assurance. Formal engineering methods provide an answer to both of these challenges through precise modelling of the system, powerful reasoning support for the models (using automated analysis tools such as theorem provers and model checkers), and afterwards exploitation in domainspecific models and code generation.

Industries are now increasingly considering formal engineering methods. DEPLOY aims at overcoming problems of integrating these methods into industrial development lifecycles, and at presenting evidence of their overall efficiency and benefits in order to foster their adoption.

Throughout the lifetime of the project, DEPLOY methods and tools will be intensively deployed in real industrial settings by the industrial partners in order to test them against the industrial imperatives of cost-effectiveness, scaling and ability to cope with evolution of requirements. The industrial deployment will be in five sectors, each of which is key to the future of European industry and society: automotive, rail transportation, space systems, telecommunications and business information. Each deployment sector will be led by a partner who is a major player in that sector.

DEPLOY capitalises on the latest research from FP6 on formal engineering methods and tools along with related research on combining formal engineering methods with methods for resilience engineering. DEPLOY will deliver major new advances over these existing methods and tools. A number of DEPLOY partners have contributed to these existing FP6 results, enabling the project to take advantage of their existing research and development bases. The rich and complementary mix of expertise with engineering challenges from the industrial deployment partners, together with the extensive technology base of the academic and service providers, comprises a consortium which is ideally suited to addressing the DEPLOY aims and which is unique in Europe and indeed internationally.

CETIC’s responsibility in the project is to quantify the benefits gained by the deployment of formal methods in industry. Such a measure is particularly critical, as it will be the main motivation for additional industrial players to deploy formal methods. To this end, CETIC first has to propose concrete measures that can provide such evidence, and then evaluate the improvement in practice of industrial partners when they deploy formal methods.

Main Achievements

The result will include both methods and tools supporting the effective deployment of formal engineering methods in the industrial setting, together with evidence about the effects of applying formal methods on productivity and dependability.

Benefits for companies

For industrial partners achieving greater system dependability is essential to maintaining the competitive edge they currently enjoy through their excellence in engineering. Deploy will provide a validated methodology to introduce formal engineering techniques in a controlled and measurable way, based on large scale experiments conducted simultaneously deployment in five major industrial sectors whose core business is the construction of safety-critical, business-critical and mission-critical systems. Such systems are required to have a high degree of dependability.

Deploy will provide a professional open source development environment for formal engineering methods and because the industrial deployment partners are committed to further improvement of their development processes. The professional development environment will build on the existing successful Eclipse-based RODIN environment.

Particular engineering problems for the industrial partners include the difficulty of requirements validation, the rapidly-growing complexity of system testing, the difficulty of maintaining quality and safety of systems under evolution and the problems caused by trying to integrate components of diverse origin. DEPLOY will address all these issues, helping the industrial partners to achieve real improvements in their engineering processes and, in the longer term, will lead to improvements in European industrial practice more generally.

Partenaires du projet

Factsheet