Atif Mashkoor

Towards the Trustworthy Development of Active Medical Devices: A Hemodialysis Case Study

The use of embedded software is advancing in modern medical devices, so does its capabilities and complexity. This paradigm shift brings many challenges such as an increased rate of medical device failures due to software faults. In this letter, we present a rigorous “correct by construction” approach for the trustworthy development of hemodialysis machines, a subclass of active medical devices. We show how informal requirements of hemodialysis machines are modeled and analyzed through a rigorous process and suggest a generalization to a larger class of active medical devices.

Asm2C++: A tool for code generation from abstract state machines to Arduino

This paper presents Asm2C++, a tool that automatically generates executable C++ code for Arduino from a formal specification given as Abstract State Machines (ASMs). The code generation process follows the model-driven engineering approach, where the code is obtained from a formal abstract model by applying certain transformation rules. The translation process is highly configurable in order to correctly integrate the underlying hardware. The advantage of the Asm2C++ tool is that it is part of the Asmeta framework that allows to analyze, verify, and validate the correctness of a formal model.

Refinement-Based Development of Software-Controlled Safety-Critical Active Medical Devices

Advanced medical devices exploit the advantages of embedded software whose development, due to their direct impact on human lives, is naturally subject to compliance with the stringent requirements of safety standards and regulations. This paper presents initial results and lessons learned from an ongoing project focusing on the development of a formal model of a sub-system of a software-controlled safety-critical Active Medical Device (AMD) responsible for renal replacement therapy. The use of formal approaches for the development of AMDs is highly recommended by standards and regulations, and motivates the recent advancement of the state of the art of related methods and tools including Event-B and Rodin applied in this paper. It is expected that the presented model and analysis will contribute to the still sparse experience base available at the disposal of the scientific and practitioner community in the domain of AMDs.

Improving the Understandability of Formal Specifications: An Experience Report

[Context and motivation] The understandability of formal specifications is often considered as one of the main factors that limit the employment of formal methods in industrial applications. [Question/problem] Two reasons account for this issue: intricate notations and a coarse style of writing specifications. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we present our experience of rendering formal specifications understandable yet rigorous. [Contribution] The main contribution of the paper is the proposition of intuitive writing style guidelines, based on the ASM method, that enable formal specifications to become understandable.

Integrating formal methods into medical software development: The ASM approach

Abstract Medical devices are safety-critical systems since their malfunctions can seriously compromise human safety. Correct operation of a medical device depends upon the controlling software, whose development should adhere to certification standards. However, these standards provide general descriptions of common software engineering activities without any indication regarding particular methods and techniques to assure safety and reliability. This paper discusses how to integrate the use of a formal approach into the current normative for the medical software development. The rigorous process is based on the Abstract State Machine (ASM) formal method, its refinement principle, and model analysis approaches the method supports. The hemodialysis machine case study is used to show how the ASM-based design process covers most of the engineering activities required by the related standards, and provides rigorous approaches for medical software validation and verification.

Abstract State Machines, Alloy, B, TLA, VDM, and Z

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Abstract State Machines, Alloy, B, TLA, VDM, and Z, ABZ 2016, held in Linz, Austria, in May 2016. The 17 full and 15 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. They record the latest research developments in state-based formal methods Abstract State Machines, Alloy, B, Circus, Event-B, TLS+, VDM and Z

Software Safety and Security Risk Mitigation in Cyber-physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) offer many opportunities but pose many challenges—especially regarding functional safety, cybersecurity, and their interplay, as well as the systems’ impact on society. Consequently, new methods and techniques are needed for CPS development and assurance. The articles in this theme issue aim to help address some of these challenges.

Unified Syntax for Abstract State Machines

The paper presents our efforts in defining UASM, a unified syntax for Abstract State Machines ASMs, based on the syntaxes of two of the main ASM frameworks, CoreASM and ASMETA, which have been adapted to accept UASM as input syntax of all their validation and verification tools.

Incremental Construction of Realizable Choreographies

This paper proposes a correct-by-construction method to build realizable choreographies described using conversation protocols (\( CP \)s). We define a new language consisting of an operators set for incremental construction of CPs. We suggest an asynchronous model described with the Event-B method and its refinement strategy, ensuring the scalability of our approach.

A systematic literature review of the use of formal methods in medical software systems.

The use of formal methods is often recommended to guarantee the provision of necessary services and to assess the correctness of critical properties, such as functional safety, cybersecurity, and reliability, in medical and health care devices. In the past, several formal and rigorous methods have been proposed and consequently applied for trustworthy development of medical software and systems. In this paper, we perform a systematic literature review on the available state of the art in this domain. We collect the relevant literature on the use of formal methods for modeling, design, development, verification, and validation of software‐intensive medical systems. We apply standard systematic literature review techniques and run several queries in well‐known repositories to obtain information that can be useful for people who are either already working in this field or planning to start. Our study covers both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the subject.