Partners

Academic Partners

These are the four roles the academic partners play in DEPLOY:

• The academic partners will assist the industrial partners, which are at different stages of acceptance and use of formal methods. This role will be crucial from the outset of the project. It will consist of spending time with the industrial partners so that they will be able to acquire an adequate level of understanding of formal methods in the DEPLOY context as well as experience in using the tools which they will need for their case studies. It will further consist in helping the industrial partners to focus on a number of deployment opportunities and to help them to successfully initiate these.

• The academic partners will learn from the difficulties encountered by the industrial partners in incorporating formal methods in their development processes and will also learn about any difficult technical problems encountered by the industrial partners, with a view to providing research effort into solutions

• The academic partners willhave an important role in conducting active research in the field of formal methods. Too often research in this field has concentrated on theoretical problems that are removed from the real problems encountered by industry. Here, thanks to experience gained from the RODIN project, the academic partners will be confronted by real problems, whose solutions will be of direct help to the industrial partners.

• The academic partners willalso be very active in the development of tools in close contact with the practical tool developers (see below). Here too, the academic partners will develop new technologies by liaising with the industrial partners and thus finding out the kinds of difficulties they encounter in their practical usage of formal methods.

As shown, the academic partners will work in close contact with the industrial partners. It is our opinion that these contacts and the corresponding outcomes (on both sides) will be a major outcome of DEPLOY.

There are 5 academic partners:

• Newcastle University has a long history in the development and use of formal methods, with a specific focus on ensuring system dependability. Moreover, Newcastle will have the challenging role of managing this project. Newcastle University has been chosen because they have extensive expertise in this domain as they have managed many large collaborative projects over the years. Newcastle has in place a team that has proved to be extremely competent and efficient in these matters (the Project Management Office).

• University of Southampton has avery strong formal method group, which has devoted itself to the application of formal methods to industrial case studies and to the development of practical tools: within the framework of the FP7 project RODIN Southampton has developed a powerful Eclipse-based tool linking UML to Event-B.

• Abo Akademi University is the home of the world famous Finnish school of formal methods which has been extremely active in this field for more than thirty years. In particular, the Event-B method has been strongly influenced by the "Action Systems" developed in Aabo. In the EU RODIN project, Aabo contributed to the development of the methodological aspects of applying formal methods for dependable systems including fault tolerance.

• University of Düsseldorf has recently initiated a group on formal methods, which has its roots in Southampton: they have already been very active in developing tools for model checking and animation with the Event-B method.

• Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich - ETHZ has a very strong group in formal method dealing, in particular with problems related to the field of Information Security. Moreover, a new generation of tools linked with the Event-B method has been developed at ETHZ, within the framework of the EU RODIN project.

All academic partners have traditionally strong links with industry and have been successfully working on industrial applications of formal methods and tools with the major international companies. The academic staff of DEPLOY includes researchers who laid the foundation of the modern formal methods and tools, as well as their successful industrial applications.