Low‐cost containerized shipping requires high‐quality stowage plans. Scalable stowage planning optimization algorithms have been developed recently. All of these algorithms, however, produce monolithic solutions that are hard for stowage coordinators to modify, which is necessary in practice owing to exceptions and operational disruptions. This article introduces an approach for modifying a stowage plan interactively without breaking its constraints. We focus on rearranging the containers in a single‐bay section and show two approaches for providing complete and backtrack‐free decision support using symbolic configuration techniques, one based on binary decision diagrams and one based on DPLL solvers. We show that binary decision diagrams can be used to solve real‐world sized instances of a single bay, and that search‐based solvers can be used to solve simplified instances going beyond a single bay.

With the omnipresent usage of APIs in software development, it has become important to analyse how the routines and functionalities of APIs are actually used. This information is in particular useful for API developers, to make decisions about future updates of the API. However, also for developers of static analysis and verification tools this information is highly important, because it indicates where and how to put the most efficient effort in annotating APIs, to make them usable for the static analysis and verification tools. This paper presents an analysis of the usage of the routines and functionalities of the Java concurrency library java. util. concurrent. It discusses the Histogram tool that we developed for this purpose, i.e., to efficiently analyse a large collection of bytecode classes. The Histogram tool is used on a representative benchmark set, the Qualitas Corpus. The paper discusses the results of the analysis of this benchmark set in detail. This covers both an analysis of the important classes and methods used by the current releases of the benchmark collection, as well as an analysis of the time it took for the Java concurrency library to start being used in released software.

Providing useful feedback to students about both the functional correctness and the internal structure of their submissions is the most labor-intensive part of teaching programming courses. The former can be automated through test scripts and other similar mechanisms; however, the latter typically requires a detailed inspection of the submitted code. This paper introduces AutoGradeMe, a tool that automates much (but not all) of the work required to grade the internal structure of a student submission in the Java programming language. It integrates with the Eclipse IDE and multiple third-party plug-ins to provide instructors with an easy-to-use grading environment. More importantly, unlike other automatic grading tools currently in use, it gives students continuous feedback about their work during the development process.

To avoid exponential explosion, program verifiers turn the program into a passive form before generating verification conditions. A little known fact is that the passive form makes it easy to use a strongest postcondition calculus to derive the verification condition. In the first part of this paper, the passivation phase is defined precisely enough to allow a study of its algorithmic properties. In the second part, the weakest precondition and strongest postcondition methods are presented in a unified way and then compared empirically.

In this extended abstract we summarize our consulting work, scientific research, and activism in the topic of electronic (computer-based) voting. The Dutch and Irish government's activities are our particular focus, as is the Kiezen op Afstand (KOA) system, an experimental platform for electronic voting research with formal methods. We also reflect on the current state of affairs in The Netherlands and Ireland, and discuss next research steps in trustworthy, verified electronic voting systems.

A mechanically formalized feature modeling metamodel is presented. This theory is a generic higher-order formalization of a mathematical model synthesizing several feature modeling approaches found in the literature. This meta-model supports not only a better understanding of the various approaches to feature modeling, but also supports reasoning about and within feature model approaches, feature models, and on feature trees and their configurations.

Summary form only given. Static program checkers rely upon push-button automation to provide quality feedback to programmers ... programmers who are not typically well-versed in a tool's foundations. Thus, ensuring program correctness is as much about program safety as it is about programmer safety. Our tool, ESC/Java, has recently incorporated a number of new programmer-centric features whose focus is on increasing programmer safety. We will discuss these features in detail as well as give some perspective on our continued work on proving program safety properties and evidencing programmer safety properties.