Description
Leader of the group Formal Methods: Frank de Boer.
In the Formal Methods group, our research involves finding solutions to highly pragmatic real-world problems by reducing their complexity through the elegance and beauty of mathematics. We formulate problems to reveal their complexity and make them amenable to elegant solutions.
Our work yields technological foundations that underpin software engineering and service-oriented computing. With everything we do, we aim to add stability and reliability to those foundations and so to the third-party applications built on them. In this way, we cut the costs of technological failure for business and society and make life easier for programmers, developers and ultimately users.
Our no-nonsense approach relies on the smooth transfer of knowledge between senior and junior researchers, reaching back through our rich history as one of CWI’s original research groups. Our work is grounded in our collaborations with partners in business and industry.
News
FACS Best Paper Award for Formal Methods researchers
During the FACS2015 conference three researchers associated with the CWI Formal Methods research group were awarded the Best Paper Award for their article ‘Composing Constraint Automata, State-by-State’. The conference was held in Niterói, Brazil, from 14-16 October 2015.
Cum laude for PhD student Jurriaan Rot
Infinite data structures can be studied with a simplified technique, thanks to research done by PhD student Jurriaan Rot. He received his PhD degree with honours (cum laude) for his thesis ‘Enhanced Coinduction’ at Leiden University on 15 October 2015. This thesis belongs to the 5% best dissertations in the field of computer science.
TCS journal honours Jan Rutten
Jan Rutten from CWI’s Formal Methods research group was recently awarded by the journal Theoretical Computer Science (TCS) for his much cited article Universal Coalgebra – a theory of systems, on the occasion of the journal’s 40th anniversary.
Java Bug Fixed with Formal Methods CWI
Researchers from CWI fixed a bug in the widely used object-oriented programming language Java in February 2015. They found an error in a broadly applied sorting algorithm, TimSort, which could crash programs.
Members
Publications
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Hiep, H.A, Maathuis, O, Bian, J, de Boer, F.S, van Eekelen, M, & de Gouw, C.P.T. (2020). Verifying OpenJDK's LinkedList using KeY. In TACAS 2020: Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (pp. 217–234). doi:10.1007/978-3-030-45237-7_13
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Serbanescu, V.N, & de Boer, F.S. (2020). On the nature of cooperative scheduling in active objects. In Proceedigns of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (pp. 1322–1329). doi:10.1145/3341105.3373896
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Azadbakht, K. (2019, December 11). Asynchronous programming in the abstract behavioural specification language.
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de Boer, F.S, & Hiep, H.A. (2019). Axiomatic characterization of trace reachability for concurrent objects. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on integrated Formal Methods (pp. 157–174). doi:10.1007/978-3-030-34968-4_9
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Esterhuyse, C.A, & Hiep, H.A. (2019). Reowolf: Synchronous multi-party communication over the Internet?. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Formal Aspects of Component Software. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-40914-2_12
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Kappé, T.W.J, Lion, B, Arbab, F, & Talcott, C. (2019). Soft component automata: Composition, compilation, logic, and verification. Science of Computer Programming, 183. doi:10.1016/j.scico.2019.08.001
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Bezirgiannis, N, de Boer, F.S, Johnsen, E.B, Pun, K.I, & Tapia Tarifa, S.L. (2019). Implementing SOS with active objects: A case study of a multicore memory system. In FASE 2019: Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (pp. 332–350). doi:10.1007/978-3-030-16722-6_20
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Rutten, J.J.M.M. (2019). The Method of Coalgebra: exercises in coinduction. CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
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Serbanescu, V.N, de Boer, F.S, & Jaghouri, M.M. (2018). ASCOOP: Actors in scala with cooperative scheduling. In 21st IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, CSE 2018 (pp. 19–28). doi:10.1109/CSE.2018.00010
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Lion, B, Chouali, S, & Arbab, F. (2018). Compiling protocols to Promela and verifying their LTL properties. In Proceedings of 21st MODELS Workshops 2018: Copenhagen, Denmark (pp. 31–39).
Software
Extensible Coordination Tools: plug-ins for the Eclipse platform
ECT: The Extensible Coordination Tools consist of a set of plug-ins for the Eclipse platform to facilitate development of concurrency protocols and distributed applications based on the coordination language Reo.
SAGA: A run-time verifier for Java programs
SAGA is a run-time verifier for single-threaded as well as multi-threaded Java programs.
Current projects with external funding
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Evolutionary changes in Distributed Analysis (ECiDA)
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Reowolf
Related partners
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Anchormen
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Vitens
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Stichting NLnethttps://nlnet.nl/contact/address.html