ERC project EQualIS

Enhancing the Quality of Interacting Systems

Keywords

synthesis of strategies, equilibria, game theory
robustness, quantitative analysis
timed systems, stochastic systems

Description of the project

The ubiquitous use of computerized systems, and their increasing complexity, demand formal evidences of their correctness. While current formal-verification techniques have already been applied to a number of case studies, they are not sufficient yet to fully analyse several aspects of complex systems such as communication networks, embedded systems or industrial controllers. There are three important characteristics of these systems which need to be tackled:

the rich interaction that crucially constrains the behaviour of such systems is poorly taken into account in the actual models;
the imprecisions and uncertainty inherent to systems that are implemented (e.g. on a digital processor), or which interact via a network, or which control physical equipments, are mostly ignored by the verification process;
the deployment of large interacting systems emphasizes the lack for a modular approach to the synthesis of systems.

The goal of this project is to develop a systematic approach to the formal analysis of interacting systems. We will use models from game theory for properly taking into account the interaction in those systems, and will propose quantitative measures of correctness and quality, that will take into account the possible perturbations in the systems. The core of the project will be the development of various algorithms for synthesizing high-quality interactive systems. We will be particularly attached to the modularity of the approach and to the development of efficient algorithms. The EQualIS project aims at enhancing the design and verification of interacting systems, by providing a rich framework, that will increase our confidence in the analysis of such systems.

Facts

Starting date: January 1, 2013
Duration: 5 years
Budget: 1,497,430 euros

Participants to the project

Patricia Bouyer (principal investigator)
Nicolas Markey (permanent researcher)
Pierre Carlier (PhD student, since October 2014)
Serge Haddad (professor ENS Cachan, since January 2015)
Samy Jaziri (PhD student, since October 2015)
Vincent Jugé (post-doctoral researcher, since February 2016)
Mauricio Gonzalez (PhD student, since March 2016)

Former members:

Patrick Gardy (PhD student, November 2013-June 2017)
Daniel Stan (PhD student, October 2013-March 2017, external funding)
Maximilien Colange (post-doctoral researcher and engineer, September 2015-August 2016)
Mickael Randour (post-doctoral researcher, October 2014-September 2015, external funding)
Mauricio Gonzalez (Master student, September 2015-February 2016)
Raj Mohan Matteplackel (post-doctoral researcher, May 2013 -- April 2015)
Samy Jaziri (Master student, March-August 2014)

Visitors:

Marco Faella (Associate Professor, Napoli (Italy), January 2013)
Deepak D'Souza (Assistant Professor, IISc Bangalore (India), December 2014)
Bhargav N. Bhatt (student, May-July 2014)
Sourabh Ghurye (student, May-July 2015)
Paul Soumyajit (student, May-July 2016)
Sven Schewe (Professor, University of Liverpool (UK), November-December 2016)
Daniel Gburek (PhD student, University of Dresden (Germany), November 2016)
Srivathsan Balagaru (Assistant Professor, CMI (India), January 2017)
Aniello Murano (Associate Professor, UniversitÃ degli Studi di Napoli Federico II (Italy), June 2017)

Publications

They can be found on this webpage.