The future of design specification and verification of safety critical interactive systems.

Abstract

Designing reliable interactive software is hard, and designing usable reliable interactive software is even harder. Experience shows that many interactive systems exhibit recurring characteristics that require in addition evolvability, assessability and certify-ability especially when safety critical systems are concerned. This tutorial projects into the future previous work we have done over the last 15 years around a Petri nets-based notation and a CASE tool supporting it, for addressing such aspects of interactive software development.The course covers the roles formal notations can play in the interactive systems' development process: how they provide complete and unambiguous descriptions of these systems,how they handle system complexity,how they can fit with interactive systems development processes (highly iterative)and how they contribute too to the implementation activities.Such elements will be addressed first by providing an historical perspective of formal descriptions techniques in the field of interactive systems and then by focusing on the Interactive Cooperative Objects notation and its CASE tool PetShop.The tutorial will also address the new challenges for formal description techniques for interactive systems in order to address on an equal basis various (generally conflicting) properties such as Safety, Usability, Reliability and Evolvability.The audience will learn on concrete examples the advantages and drawbacks of using formal description techniques for various kinds of interactive systems including WIMP, post-Wimp and multimodal interaction techniques. The examples will be taken from various industrial domains including cockpits, satellite ground segments and Air Traffic Control.