ACTIVITIES OF THE ASM RESEARCH CENTER

The basis and currently the major field of activities of the Center is  the further  development and deployment of the ASM method as a reliable  software technology method.   The ASM method has proved already to guide the controllable construction and maintenance of software-intensive systems, seamlessly from requirements elicitation and capture through detailed design to coding, bridging the gap between

•  understanding and formulating real-world problems by humans and
•  the realization of their solutions by code-executing machines on changing platforms.

One concrete goal is to improve current industrial practice by providing during the successive stages of the system development cycle system descriptions that are accurate and coherently linked to each other, so that the documents produced at different levels are synchronized and constitute a coherent chain of stepwise refined models, a chain through which the requirements and their refinements can be reliably  traced and modified during system changes.

Therefore the current activities in the Center aim at supporting,within a coherent conceptual framework, the integration of standard design, analysis and documentation methods and tools for 

•  modeling (construction of accurate succinct requirements models, called ground models ),
•  model transformation and reuse (by refinement /abstraction, code generation),
•  model validation (by simulation and model-based testing),
•  model verification (by reasoning and proof techniques),
•  model maintenance (using structured documentation ).

The Center acts as a means of communication and documentation of the past, ongoing and planned ASM-related research and development work, in particular of its members and associated  members. To achieve this, a repository of ASM-related system development work is maintained supporting electronic access to a complete documentation for reusing the construction of (chains of) ASM models, together with their analysis in terms of validation (testing) or verification. Also a series of research reports of the Center is published, where electronic drafts of recent work, including preliminary versions of papers intended for publication, are made available by members.

The Center also works for the deployment of the ASM method in industry and academia. Material for ASM-based courses on various themes and for a variety of audiences will be prepared and made available electronically.

Apart from the founding organizations the centre is open to affiliate members, who use the ASM method in their research or development projects, in particular if in collaboration with the founding members. In case of interest in an affiliation, write to one of the co-directors boerger@di.unipi.it or glaesser@cs.sfu.ca