Distributed Software Engineering research addresses the challenges of building dependable, adaptive and secure distributed systems. The Section has received major grants including Aedus2 EPSRC platform grant which has provided baseline funding over most of the REF period. Other major grants include IBM led ITA funding from the MOD/US Army over 7 years an ERC starting grant on partial behaviour modelling, plus the recent funding for the Intel and NEC centres resulting from work on mobile ad-hoc and sensor networks for urban environments.
Highlights include a platform for model-driven generative programming to facilitate experimental design and execution management for distributed systems, predictable data centre network analysis for inclusion in Microsoft’s Azure platform, middleware for secure event-processing based on information flow control models, tools for analysing firewalls and network protocols using logic-based reasoning, and Ponder2, a toolset for adaptive policy-based management of distributed and ubiquitous systems. Significant achievements in requirements engineering include the synergistic use of inductive logic programming and abduction with model checking techniques to support the synthesis of scenarios and goals into operational requirements.
