DISCS (Diversity in Safety Critical Software) Project

This is a joint project between the two Centres for Software Reliability (CSR) at City and Newcastle Universities. The plan is to address two main issues: how to organise the diverse versions and their development processes in order to best achieve reliability, and how to evaluate the reliability that has been achieved in a particular system.

One of the directions of this research is developing a general framework for N-version programming in which diversity is introduced at the class level and demonstrating it in Ada. Several new advanced schemes have been designed since the original scheme [1] was developed. They tackle different aspects on N-version programming: faulty version recovery, exception handling, multiple callers, etc. All schemes are developed as sets of re-usable classes and templates for programmers to follow.

Another focus of the research is building frameworks for providing state restoration and persistence features in object-oriented programming languages (see [7, 8]). The approach relies on applying existing design patterns, such as Serializer, Factory Method and Strategy.

DISCS papers and technical reports:

1. A. Romanovsky. Class Diversity Support in Object-Oriented Languages. Journal of Systems and Software. v. 48, 1999, pp. 43-57. (A preliminary version: Department of Computing Science. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, CS-TR-661. 1999. ps file.)
   
2. A.Romanovsky. "On N-Version Programming and Exception Handling", in the 10th European Workshop on Dependable Computing (EWDC-10), Vienna, Austria, May, OCG, pp. 175-179, 1999.
   
3. A.Romanovsky. "Abstract Object State and Version Recovery in N-Version Programming", in TOOLS Europe'99, June, Nancy, France, IEEE CS, pp. 86-95, 1999. (A preliminary version: Department of Computing Science. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, CS-TR-669. 1999. ps file.)
   
4. P. Popov, L. Strigini, A. Romanovsky. "Choosing effective methods for design diversity - how to progress from intuition to science", in SafeComp'99, Toulouse, France, September, p. 272-285, 1999. (A preliminary version: Department of Computing Science. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, CS-TR-666. 1999. ps file.)
   
5. A.Romanovsky. "An Exception Handling Framework for N-Version programming in Object-Oriented Systems". To be presented at the 3rd IEEE Int. Symposium on Object-oriented Real-time Distributed Computing. 2000. Newport Beach, USA. (A preliminary version: Department of Computing Science. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, CS-TR-684. 1999. ps file.)
   
6. A.Romanovsky. "Faulty Version Recovery in Object-Oriented N-Version Programming". Department of Computing Science. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, CS-TR-679. 1999. ps file.
   
7. J.Kienzle, A.Romanovsky. On Persistent and Reliable Streaming in Ada. in AdaEurope'2000, Berlin, Germany, LNCS, Springer, June, 2000. (A preliminary version: Technical Report 99/323, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, November 1999.)
   
8. J.Kienzle, A.Romanovsky. "A Framework Based on Design Patterns for Providing Persistence in Object-Oriented Programming Languages". University of Newcastle upon Tyne, CS-TR-688. November, 1999. ps file.
   
9. A.Romanovsky. Diversely Designed Classes for use by Multiple Tasks. Ada Letters, v. XX, n. 1, March, 2000. (A preliminary version: Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, CS-TR-691. February, 2000.)
   

The official DISCS Newcastle web page.

The City web page of this project.

DISCS research papers by the CSR at City.