Welcome to the Formal Methods & Software Engineering group at DC - UNRC.

Our research goal is to contribute to how software is developed, by improving its modeling, design, construction and assessment, through the use of well-founded mechanisms for software specification and analysis. Our research interests include:

  • Our work on Requirements Engineering, which provides tools for automated and semi-automated analysis of requirements, especially when requirements are formally expressed.
  • Our work on the so-called oracle problem, which concentrates in developing techniques for producing formal software specifications for object oriented systems, targeting the challenge of distinguishing the desired correct behavior of software from potentially incorrect behaviors.
  • Our work on software testing, with the design of new testing criteria, such as Field-exhaustive testing, as well as techniques for automated test generation, generally based on the use of formal software specifications.
  • Our work on tool support for software modeling and analysis, via the development of tools such as DynAlloy Analyzer, (which provides fully automated analysis for dynamic behavioral specifications over Alloy, using its dynamic-logic based extension DynAlloy) and Counting Fluent Labelled Transition System Analyzer (which extends LTSA with support for temporal properties that can refer to the number of times certain events have occurred).
  • Our work on the foundations of Software Engineering, with the development and use of logics for software specification, and algorithms for their analysis.
  • Our work on the development of tools and techniques for improving how Computing in general, and Formal Methods in particular, are taught.

We tackle research problems in the context of software engineering, using solid scientific and engineering principles, and strongly based on mathematical and logical elements for software construction.

Our group is composed of research staff, postdocs, doctoral and masters students. If you’re interested in finding out more about the group, do contact us!