Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

Software has known a spectacular development this last decade both in its scope of applicability and its size. Nevertheless, software design, development and engineering methods remain mostly manual, hence error-prone. It follows that complex software-based systems are unsafe and insecure, which is not acceptable in safety-critical or mission-critical applications. Intellectual and computer-based tools must therefore be developed to cope with the safety and security problems.

The notions of abstraction and approximation, as formalized by the abstract interpretation theory, are fundamental to design, model, develop, analyze, and verify highly complex systems, from computer-based to biological ones. They also underlie the design of safety and security verification tools.