An analysis of the results from Technical Reviews of 18 European Space
Agency (ESA) projects, conducted late 2000, has shown that one of the top
technical problem areas was on-board software, whose complexity, size and
verification are often severely under estimated, leading to budget and time
over-runs. In the scope of the ESA Software Initiative, an in-depth analysis
has shown that "there is no software crisis but a system crisis", meaning
that the origin of the software crisis was in fact a lack in system
engineering. Consequently, a significant effort is made within ESA to
formalize the models and processes deployed in system engineering and to
streamline the interface between system and software design.

In parallel, the recent years have seen the emergence of OMG's SysML as a
widely accepted system modeling language. However, SysML language remains
very informal from semantic point of view and incomplete with respect to the
needs of embedded system design. Our research focuses on the formalization
of the language by providing a consistent semantics, complemented by
analysis and verification tools. The talk will overview the OMEGA SysML
profile, which refines a subset of SysML and provides a consistent and
unambiguous semantics for it. We will then cover the simulation and
verification tools for OMEGA SysML and present some of the experimental
results obtained on significant case studies provided by our partners from
industry.

3:00pm, Thursday, March 17, 2011, Grey conference room, 1st floor, ISIS

About the presenter:

Iulian Ober is an Associate Professor at the University of Toulouse, France.
He obtained a PhD from the Institut National Polytechnique - ENSEEIHT of
Toulouse, in 2001. Until 2005 he was a post-doctoral researcher at the
Verimag Laboratory in Grenoble, France. He has joined the faculty at the
University of Toulouse in 2005 and obtained an HDR (Habilitation to Direct
Research) in 2010. His research area covers model-driven design and
validation of real-time embedded systems, in particular using industry
standards such as SDL, UML or SysML. The specification and analysis
techniques he developed in the Omega project and subsequent projects were
successfully applied on several industrial applications from the aerospace
domain. He has co-chaired or been on the steering committee of several
events including the 2011 System Design Languages Conference and the ACES-MB
workshop series.