Safety Analysis of Concurrent Systems

Software faults that evade testing can have serious consequences, not sparing economic damages or human losses.

Recent developments towards multi-core processors have led to the increased usage of concurrency to utilize the hardware's full potential.

While helping to make software ever more capable, this further complicates the already laborious and time-consuming challenge of software testing.

Not only tremendously increasing the computational effort needed to automatically find concurrency bugs, such errors prove to be especially tricky to find and fix even for professional software developers. Yet, currently the market does not provide a satisfying solution to addresses this challenge.

The PoC project SAFE, however, offers a comprehensive, rigorous, and automated methodology for systematically finding errors in concurrent software.

Based on state-of-the-art technology, an academic prototype developed as part of the ERC CoG SYMBIOSYS project has established the algorithmic applicability of the core methodology, already finding a number of bugs in real-world concurrent software.

The project includes 5 tasks: (1) To establish the technical requirements for transitioning the prototype into a product, the required engineering tasks will be defined. (2) To complete core features and laying technical groundwork for commercialization, the technology will be engineered to serve a wider range of software. (3) To secure the exploitation strategy through a consolidated IP position, the legal framework for license agreements and IPR strategy will be laid. (4) To raise awareness for SAFE, the market niche to be targeted will be identified by completing a market analysis, including an account of the competitive landscape. (5) To validate commercial feasibility and create a business plan for exploitation beyond SAFE, various exploitation strategies will be evaluated, such as the foundation of a Softw.-as-a-Service spin-off; resulting in a business plan and a feasibility report.