We report on the main challenges we had to overcome while bootstrapping, commercializing and scaling our automated sentiment analysis solution in the media intelligence industry. Over the span of four years, our solution evolved from a run-of-the-mill component to a bespoke in-house bred flagship feature that, to our knowledge, trumps those of our industry peers. From all the learnings to date, the most significant one has been shifting our data labeling efforts from a third party to a completely in-house controlled process — a move that brought us noticeable improvements in inferencing quality.

This paper reports on the usage of a broad palette of formal modeling and analysis techniques on a regular industrial-size design of an ultra-modern satellite platform. These efforts were carried out in parallel with the conventional software development of the satellite platform. The model itself is expressed in a formalized dialect of AADL. Its formal nature enables rigorous and automated analysis, for which the recently developed COMPASS toolset was used. The whole effort revealed numerous inconsistencies in the early design documents, and the use of formal analyses provided additional insight on discrete system behavior (comprising nearly 50 million states), on hybrid system behavior involving discrete and continuous variables, and enabled the automated generation of large fault trees (66 nodes) for safety analysis that typically are constructed by hand. The model's size pushed the computational tractability of the algorithms underlying the formal analyses, and revealed bottlenecks for future theoretical research. Additionally, the effort led to newly learned practices from which subsequent formal modeling and analysis efforts shall benefit, especially when they are injected in the conventional software development lifecycle. The case demonstrates the feasibility of fully capturing a system-level design as a single comprehensive formal model and analyze it automatically using a toolset based on (probabilistic) model checkers.

This paper presents a component-based modelling approach to system-software co-engineering of real-time embedded systems, in particular aerospace systems. Our method is centred around the standardized Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) modelling framework. We formalize a significant subset of AADL, incorporating its recent Error Model Annex for modelling faults and repairs. The major distinguishing aspects of this component-based approach are the possibility to describe nominal hardware and software operations, hybrid (and timing) aspects, as well as probabilistic faults and their propagation and recovery. Moreover, it supports dynamic (i.e. on-the-fly) reconfiguration of components and inter-component connections. The operational semantics gives a precise interpretation of specifications by providing a mapping onto networks of event-data automata. These networks are then subject to different kinds of formal analysis such as model checking, safety and dependability analysis and performance evaluation. Mature tool support realizes these analyses. The activities reported in this paper are carried out in the context of the correctness, modelling, and performance of aerospace systems, project which is funded by the European Space Agency.

This paper presents a model-based approach to system-software co-engineering which is focused on aerospace systems but is relevant to a much wider class of dependable systems. We present the main ingredients of the SLIM modeling language and give a precise interpretation of SLIM models by providing a formal semantics using networks of event-data automata. The major distinguishing aspects of this component-based approach are the possibility to describe nominal hardware and software operations, hybrid (and timing) aspects, as well as probabilistic faults and their propagation and recovery. As our approach bears strong resemblance to the standardized AADL (Architecture Analysis and Design Language), a secondary contribution of this paper is a formal semantics of a large fragment of AADL including its Error Model Annex.

This paper reports on a model-based approach to system-software co-engineering which is tailored to critical on-board systems for the aerospace domain but is relevant to a much wider class of dependable systems. Our main contribution is a formal semantics for a greater part of standardised AADL, the Architecture Analysis and Design Language, and its Error Model Annex. It covers nominal and degraded hardware/software operations, hybrid (and timing) aspects as well as probabilistic faults, their propagation and recovery. The accompanying software toolset employs SAT-based and symbolic model checking techniques and probabilistic variants thereof. The precise nature of these techniques together with the formal semantics provide a trustworthy modelling and analysis framework to support, among others, assessment of functional correctness, evaluation of performance measures and automated derivation of dynamic fault trees, FMEA tables and observability requirements.