No: IST-2001-38059 FET

Advanced Specialization and Analysis for Pervasive Computing

EU IST FET Programme Project Number IST-2001-38059

Members (@ Southampton)

Other Members

Project Description

Such platforms are becoming ever smaller and more powerful, and are embedded everywhere, even in living organisms. They can contain sophisticated models of our personal environment that help us to make everyday decisions; they have the power to do mathematical and logical reasoning in order to perform intelligent tasks. As a result, system development and validation techniques have to keep pace with the huge requirements for intelligent, user-oriented applications that must run on devices with reduced computing resources.

Development tools for pervasive computing platforms has been identified by the EC as one of the main areas that require drastic improvements. Indeed, the development tools available for such pervasive computing platforms are lagging behind the state-of-the-art and there is a strong need by industry to optimize development cost, reliability, and time to market. Unfortunately, the tendency of current software engineering techniques is to produce more and more bloated, general-purpose systems, built from large libraries of pre-written modules. While this approach can increase productivity and reliability, it is wasteful of computing resources. Pervasive system developers are always forced to operate on the boundaries of available computing resources, even though processors, storage and communication networks are getting cheaper. One wants to pack as much functionality as possible into a given device. The main approaches adopted are either to produce by hand "stripped-down" versions of full systems in an ad-hoc manner, or to write applications from scratch taking limited resources into account.

This project proposes a different approach: the automated generation and validation of specialized systems from general ones, using powerful tools and techniques for static analysis and specialization of systems.

Objectives:

1. To automate as much as possible the development of sophisticated and reliable software systems for pervasive computing platforms.
2. To develop a novel method for system development for pervasive computing, based on the automatic generation of specialized systems e.g., from general, already existing ones.
3. To develop a novel integrated tool which implements the above method and make it available to system developers as open source code.

1. To study the particular needs and requirements of pervasive computing applications. This will be possible by the collaboration within the project of experts in pervasive computing with experts in techniques for program analysis and transformation.
2. To advance the state of the art in analysis and specialization techniques. Factors often neglected by existing techniques, such as memory usage and low-level efficiency issues should also be taken into account.
3. To pay special attention to correctness issues, both at development and exploitation time. Pervasive systems often interact with other systems which may in turn provide erroneous data.
4. To make our techniques capable of dealing with all the features of realistic programming languages. Many existing tools and techniques are only useful for toy programming languages or restricted versions of real ones.
5. To apply the method and tools proposed to a set of case studies in pervasive computing. This would provide both feed-back and measurable criteria for the degree of success of the project.

Research Activities

• See the Agenda for April's Meeting.
  
  
• CRIPUC: Special Session in the IEEE Conference on System, Man & Cybernetics
  10-13 October 2004 - The Hague, Netherlands.
  
  
• Workshop on Software Analysis and Development for Pervasive Systems (SONDA)
  24-28 August 2004 - Verona, Italy.
  
  
• Go to the restricted area.