2007 Science of Design (SoD) PI Meeting – Project Nuggets

1. 2007 Science of Design (SoD) PI Meeting – Project Nuggets Links fail in wireless ad hoc network, spanning tree is regenerated in a hierarchical fashion Project Description and Outcomes: Goal(s) of the project: We endeavor to develop a new science of design in which efficient formal techniques are used to construct reliable software-intensive systems from unreliable hardware and software components. This Work is notable because (potential contributions to the Science of Design): This work will enable the design of complex, large-scale, distributed systems from unreliable components. We will use model checking to prove reliability. Previous approaches have faced great difficulty with complex design problems. We are in the process of developing efficient methods to enable the use of model checking on complex dynamically changing systems such as mobile ad-hoc wireless networks. We are presently in the initial stages of developing automated techniques to increase specification abstraction for improved model checking efficiency. We will also use run-time checking and filtering techniques to make highly-complex problems amenable to formal proofs of correctness via model checking. Progress so far: Thus far, we have considered two problems in which reliability is essential: the coordination of distributed agents and the communication of agents in a mobile ad-hoc wireless network. We have specified the distributed asynchronous system consensus problem in the TLA+ language and used model checking to illustrate the additional power brought by access to run-time checkers. We have also specified a version of spanning tree formation problem that is robust to link failures. This algorithm is at the root of routing protocols used in mobile ad-hoc wireless networks.