News from the Software Modeling and Verification group (MOVES) at RWTH Aachen University.https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/enhttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-09-14-paper-in-theoretical-computer-science/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-09-14-paper-in-theoretical-computer-science/The paper “Probabilistic Programming Meets Automata Theory: Exact Inference using Weighted Automata” by Dominik Geißler (TU Berlin) and Tobias Winkler has been accepted for publication in Theoretical Computer Science. The paper introduces probability generating automata (PGA), a class of weighted automata used to encode distributions over nonnegative integers. PGAs can be manipulated via standard automata-theoretic constructions (product, concatenation, etc.) to enable inference in a rich class…Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-07-02-eatcs-best-paper-award/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-07-02-eatcs-best-paper-award/The paper “Approximately Compatible Graph Predicates: Verifying Program Termination using Graph Grammars” by Alexander Ferber, Ira Fesefeldt, Thomas Noll and Emmett Rayes has received the EATCS Best Paper Award at the 19th International Conference on Graph Transformation (ICGT 2026) in Rennes, France. It introduces a novel technique to verify termination of imperative programs supporting heap-manipulating operations and especially dynamic data structures. The idea is to use graph grammars (more…Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-06-11-cav-2027-website-online/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-06-11-cav-2027-website-online/We are pleased to announce that the MOVES group at RWTH Aachen University, together with the University of Twente, will organize CAV 2027, the 39th International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. CAV is the flagship conference in the field of automated verification. The 2027 edition will take place from July 19–23, 2027, at KIT in Amsterdam and will be the first CAV edition held in the Netherlands. The conference website is now online:…Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-06-05-best-paper-award-at-fm-2026/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-06-05-best-paper-award-at-fm-2026/The paper “Verifying Sampling Algorithms via Distributional Invariants” by Daniel Zilken, Kevin Batz, Joost-Pueter Katoen and Tobias Winkler has won the Best Paper Award at the Formal Methods Symposium 2026 in Tokyo! 🎉🇯🇵. Discrete samplers are to probabilistic computing what arithmetic is for classical programs — powering randomised algorithms, cryptography, AI planning, probabilistic inference, and simulation. But how to prove them correct? Exactly. The key idea: treat probabilistic…Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-05-04-distinguished-artefactetaps26/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-05-04-distinguished-artefactetaps26/The paper “Generating Functions Meet Occupation Measures: Invariant Synthesis for Probabilistic Loops” by Darion Haase, Kevin Batz, Adrian Gallus, Benjamin Kaminski (Saarland Univ.), Joost-Pieter Katoen, Lutz Klinkenberg and Tobias Winkler received the Distinguished Artefact Award at ETAPS 2026 in Turin.Mon, 04 May 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-05-04-paper-in-information-and-computation-2/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-05-04-paper-in-information-and-computation-2/The paper entitled “On Termination of Polynomial Programs with Equality Conditions” by Yangjia Li (ISCAS), Mingshuai Chen (Zhejiang Univ.), Liangran Zhao (Peking Univ.), Naijun Zhan (Peking Univ.), Hui Lu (Nanjing), Guohua Wu (Nanyang Univ.), and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for publication in the journal Information and Computation. The paper provides a decidability result for the termination problem on a wide class of multi-path polynomial programs (MPPs) which were proposed more…Mon, 04 May 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-04-21-paper-at-cav-2026/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-04-21-paper-at-cav-2026/The research paper “Fast Computation of Conditional Probabilities in MDPs and Markov Chain Families” by Sebastian Junges, Luko van der Maas (both Radboud University, Nijmegen), Milan Ceska, Filip Macák (both Brno University of Technology), and Tim Quatmann (RWTH) has been accepted for CAV 2026. The paper introduces a practically efficient method to compute optimal conditional reachability probabilities in MDPs. On acyclic MDPs, the approach decides in linear time, whether the conditional…Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-04-20-tool-paper-at-cav-2026/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-04-20-tool-paper-at-cav-2026/The tool paper “Caesar: A Deductive Verifier for Probabilistic Programs” by Philipp Schröer, Kevin Batz, Umut Yiğit Dural, Darion Haase, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Christoph Matheja has been accepted for presentation at the 38th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2026), to be held in Lisbon, Portugal. The paper reports on five years of development of Caesar, a deductive verifier for probabilistic programs. Compared to the earlier OOPSLA 2023…Mon, 20 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-04-07-paper-at-rexai-2026/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-04-07-paper-at-rexai-2026/The paper entitled “Verifying STL Properties of Sliding-Window Neural Classifiers under Adversarial Perturbations” by Xaver Fink (CERN+RWTH), Borja Adiego Fernandez (CERN) and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for presemtation at RExAI 2026 : International Workshop on Formal Requirements Engineering and Artificial Intelligence. This paper considers the problem of robustness verification (using STL) for neural network classifiers that operate on time-series data via sliding windows.Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-03-15-paper-at-nfm-2026/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-03-15-paper-at-nfm-2026/The paper “Adversarial Robustness of Time-Series Classification for Crystal Collimator Alignment” by Xaver Fink (RWTH & CERN), Borja Fernandez Adiego, Daniele Mirarchi, Eloise Matheson, Álvaro García González, Gianmarco Ricci (all CERN), Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for presentation at the 18th NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM 2026). The paper analyzes and improves the adversarial robustness of a convolutional neural network (CNN) that assists crystal-collimator alignment at the…Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-03-10-storm-tutorial-at-fm-2026/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-03-10-storm-tutorial-at-fm-2026/The tutorial “Probabilistic Model Checking Taken by Storm” by Matthias Volk (Eindhoven Univ. of Technology), Linus Heck, Sebastian Junges (Radboud University), Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Tim Quatmann has been accepted for publication and presentation at the Formal Methods 2026 Symposium in Tokyo.Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-02-12-moves-sollerhaus-workshop/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-02-12-moves-sollerhaus-workshop/From January 23 to 30, the MOVES Group organised the 10th edition of its famous Söllerhaus Workshop at Hirschegg in Kleinwalsertal, Austria. Again, it was a very successful event, full of research talks, discussions, and (a little bit of) skiing.Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-02-12-paper-at-aamas-2026/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-02-12-paper-at-aamas-2026/The paper entitled “Verification of Robust Multi-Agent Systems” by Raphael Berthon, Munyque Myttelmann, (CNRS, LIPN, Sorbonne Paris North University) Joost-Pieter Katoen and Nello Morano (University of Napels) has been accepted for presentation at the 25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2026). This paper investigates robust verification strategies for stochastic multi‑agent systems with probabilistic ATL objectives under partial observability.Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-02-08-1-2-3-papers-at-formal-methods-2026/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2026-02-08-1-2-3-papers-at-formal-methods-2026/The following three papers have been accepted for the 27th Symposium on Formal Methods (2026) in Tokyo, Japan: (1) Tools and Algorithms for Sound Multi-Objective Probabilistic Model Checking by Arnd Hartmanns (U. Twente), Tim Quatmann and Mark van Wijk (U. Twente). This paper introduces tools for approximating multi-objective probabilistic model checking for Markov decision processes (MDPs) via a process of over- and under-approximation that converges towards sound results. (2) Verifying…Sun, 08 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-12-22-19047/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-12-22-19047/The paper entitled “Multiple Long-Run and omega-Regular Objectives in MDPs” by Julius Ide, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Hannah Mertens and Tim Quatmann has been accepted for TACAS 2026, to be held in Turin, Italy. The paper was one of the 56 (out of 190) papers that were accepted and presents presents algorithms for solving multi-objective problems in Markov Decision Processes, specifically addressing the achievability question: does there exist a strategy that meets a given set of objectives?Mon, 22 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-12-22-paper-at-tacas-2026/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-12-22-paper-at-tacas-2026/The paper entitled ““Multiple Long-Run and omega-Regular Objectives in MDPs” by Julius Ide, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Hannah Mertens and Tim Quatmann has been accepted for TACAS 2026, to be held in Turin, Italy. The paper was one of the 56 (out of 190) papers that were accepted and presents presents algorithms for solving multi-objective problems in Markov Decision Processes, specifically addressing the achievability question: does there exist a strategy that meets a given set of objectives?Mon, 22 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-12-22-two-papers-at-esop-2026/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-12-22-two-papers-at-esop-2026/Two papers of the MOVES group have been accepted for the European Symposium on Programming (ESOP) 2026 to be held in Turin, Italy. The paper “Error Localization, Certificates, and Hints for Probabilistic Program Verification via Slicing” by Philipp Schröer, Darion Haase, and Joost-Pieter Katoen presents novel slicing concepts for probabilistic programs, their formalisation and experimental results. More details can be found in the blog post on the Caesar website, including a link to a preprint.…Mon, 22 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-12-12-paper-at-icalepcs-2025/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-12-12-paper-at-icalepcs-2025/The paper “Towards safe and robust neural network controllers at CERN: a review of methods and challenges” by Xaver Fink, Borja Fernandez Adiego (CERN), Brad Schofield (CERN) and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted at the 20th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems (ICALEPCS’25, https://proceedings.jacow.org/icalepcs2025/). The paper reviews the challenges of ensuring safety, robustness, and stability in context of neural network-based control…Fri, 12 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-12-03-two-papers-at-lafi-2026/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-12-03-two-papers-at-lafi-2026/The two papers “Verifying Sampling Algorithms via Distributional Invariants” by Kevin Batz (University College London), Joost-Pieter Katoen, Tobias Winkler and Daniel Zilken and “Generating Functions Meet Occupation Measures: Invariant Synthesis for Probabilistic Loops” by Kevin Batz (University College London), Adrian Gallus, Darion Haase, Benjamin Kaminski (Saarland University and University College London), Joost-Pieter Katoen, Lutz Klinkenberg and Tobias Winkler have been accepted at the…Wed, 03 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-11-26-mission-at-space-tech-expo-2025/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-11-26-mission-at-space-tech-expo-2025/From November 18 to 20, 2025, the MISSION Project was represented at the Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen, Germany—Europe’s largest B2B space event. Our project partners D3TN and Osmium each hosted a booth, showcasing their latest developments and highlighting MISSION’s contributions to the design of reliable and efficient next-generation spacecraft. The D3TN booth The Osmium booth Two short presentations about the MISSION Project were also given at the D3TN booth: one by Gregory Stock from…Wed, 26 Nov 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-11-14-paper-at-dafny-2026/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-11-14-paper-at-dafny-2026/The paper “Diagnostics in Probabilistic Program Verification” by Philipp Schröer, Darion Haase, and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted at the Dafny 2026 workshop. The paper focuses on effective user diagnostics generated during the deductive verification of probabilistic programs. It is based on providing different kinds of program slices for (1) error reporting, (2) proof simplification, and (3) preserving successful verification results.Fri, 14 Nov 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-11-13-paper-in-fmsd-journal-5/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-11-13-paper-in-fmsd-journal-5/The paper “Search and Explore: Symbiotic Policy Synthesis in POMDPs” by Roman Andruishchenko (Brno University of Technology), Alexander Bork, Milan Češka (Brno University of Technology), Sebastian Junges (Radboud University), Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Filip Macák (Brno University of Technology) has been accepted in Formal Methods in System Design (Special Issue CAV 2023). The paper presents a symbiotic anytime algorithm that tightly integrates a belief-based and an inductive approach for…Thu, 13 Nov 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-11-13-paper-in-fsmd-journal/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-11-13-paper-in-fsmd-journal/The paper “Search and Explore: Symbiotic Policy Synthesis in POMDPs” by Roman Andruishchenko (Brno University of Technology), Alexander Bork, Milan Češka (Brno University of Technology), Sebastian Junges (Radboud University), Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Filip Macák (Brno University of Technology) has been accepted in Formal Methods in System Design (Special Issue CAV 2023). The paper presents a symbiotic anytime algorithm that tightly integrates a belief-based and an inductive approach for…Thu, 13 Nov 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-08-30-paper-at-ictac-2025/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-08-30-paper-at-ictac-2025/The paper “Weighted Automata for Exact Inference in Discrete Probabilistic Programs” by Dominik Geißler (TU Berlin) and Tobias Winkler has been accepted for presentation at ICTAC 2025. The paper explores the use of weighted automata for performing inference in probabilistic programs over integer variables.Sat, 30 Aug 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-07-16-paper-in-journal-on-automated-reasoning/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-07-16-paper-in-journal-on-automated-reasoning/The paper “Computing Expected Visiting Times and Stationary Distributions in Markov Chains: Fast and Accurate” by Hannah Mertens, Tim Quatmann, Tobias Winkler and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Automated Reasoning. This paper presents several numerical algorithms to compute expected visiting times (aka: occupation times) in DTMCs and CTMCs, and aplies them to efficiently and accurately computing stationary distributions. The paper extends the TACAS 2024…Wed, 16 Jul 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-07-05-paper-at-atva-2026/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-07-05-paper-at-atva-2026/The paper entitled “Generalized Parameter Lifting: Finer Abstractions for Parametric Markov Chains” by Linus Heck (RU Nijmegen), Tim Quatmann, Jip Spel, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Sebastian Junges (RU Nijmegen) has been accepted for the 23rd International Symposium on Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis (ATVA 2025). This paper advances parameter lifting, a technique to check whether all instances of a parametric Markov chain (pMC) satisfy a specification. Experiments show that our…Sat, 05 Jul 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-06-05-two-papers-at-sttt/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-06-05-two-papers-at-sttt/The two papers “What is the Best Algorithm for MDP Model Checking?” by Tim Quatmann and “The Revised Practitioner’s Guide to MDP Model Checking Algorithms” by Arnd Hartmanns (University of Twente), Sebastian Junges (Radboud University), Tim Quatmann, and Maximilian Weininger (TU Munich, IST Austria) have been accepted in the International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (Special Issues RRRR 2022 and TACAS 2023, respectively). Both papers address the current state of the art in…Thu, 05 Jun 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-05-27-two-papers-at-concur-2025/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-05-27-two-papers-at-concur-2025/Two papers of the MOVES group have been accepted at CONCUR 2025, the 36th International Conference on Concurrency Theory. It concerns the papers “Compositional Reasoning for Parametric Probabilistic Automata” by Hannah Mertens, Tim Quatmann, and Joost-Pieter Katoen, as well as “A Direct Reduction from Parity to Simple Stochastic Games” by Raphael Berthon, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Zihan Zhou (NUS, Singapore). The first paper presents an assume-guarantee framework for compositional reasoning…Tue, 27 May 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-05-13-kevin-batz-receives-etaps-dissertation-award/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-05-13-kevin-batz-receives-etaps-dissertation-award/During the ETAPS 2025 Conference at Hamilton, Canada, Kevin Batz has received the prestigious Doctoral Dissertation Award of the ETAPS Association. His PhD dissertation thesis entitled “Automated Deductive Verification of Probabilistic Programs” was considered a milestone, greatly advancing the state-of the art in automated deductive verification of discrete probabilistic programs.Tue, 13 May 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-05-07-paper-at-uai-2025/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-05-07-paper-at-uai-2025/The paper entitled “Multi-Cost-Bounded Reachability Analysis of POMDPs” by Alexander Bork, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Tim Quatmann and Svenja Stein has been accepted for the 41st Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2025) in Rio de Janeiro (BR). The paper presents a general framework to approximate the maximal probability to reach a target while satisfying constraints on the accumulated costs for multiple cost measures in POMDPs.Wed, 07 May 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-05-01-paper-at-fscd-2025/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-05-01-paper-at-fscd-2025/The paper entield "Weighted Rewriting: Semiring Semantics for Abstract Reduction Systems" by Emma Ahrens, Jan-Christoph Kassing, Jürgen Giesl and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the 10th International Conference on Formal Structures for Computation and Deduction (FSCD 2025) in Birmingham (UK). This paper introduces a general semantics of the (possibly infinite) reduction sequences of an abstract reduction system in a semi-ring that is a complete lattice (for its natural ordering…Thu, 01 May 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-04-14-paper-at-icalp-2025/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-04-14-paper-at-icalp-2025/The paper entitled “Bayesian Inference in Quantum Programs” by Christina Gehnen, Dominique Unruh and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for presentation at the 52nd EATCS International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025 – Track B). This paper considers postselection in quantum physics (aka: Bayesian conditioning in programs), for quantum while-programs, defines an operational and denotational semantics over infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, and proves their…Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-04-03-paper-at-cav-2025/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-04-03-paper-at-cav-2025/The papers “Approximate Probabilistic Bisimulation for Continuous-Time Markov Chains” by Timm Spork, Christel Baier, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Sascha Klüppelholz, and Jakob Piribauer and “Efficient Probabilistic Model Checking for Relational Reachability” by Lina Gerlach, Tobias Winkler, Erika Ábrahám, Borzoo Bonakdarpour and Sebastian Junges have been accepted at the International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV) 2025. The first paper presents a new notion of approximate bisimulation…Thu, 03 Apr 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-03-17-paper-at-verifai/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-03-17-paper-at-verifai/The paper “Using GPUs And LLMs Can Be Satisfying for Nonlinear Real Arithmetic Problems” by Christopher Brix, Julia Walczak, Nils Lommen and Thomas Noll has been accepted for presentation at the VerifAI Workshop at ICLR 2025. The paper describes how satisfying assignments to quantifier-free NRA problems can be found using GPU acceleration, and how LLMs can be used to automatically generate efficient code for this purpose.Mon, 17 Mar 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-02-18-paper-at-or-spektrum/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-02-18-paper-at-or-spektrum/The paper “The Dial-a-Ride Problem in Primary Care with Flexible Scheduling” by Felix Engelhardt, Emma Ahrens, Christina Büsing together with Felix Rauh from University Leuven has been accepted for publication in the journal OR Spektrum. The paper generalizes the Dial-A-Ride problem, which models the transportation of patients in a rural area, such that it differentiates between chronic and walk-in patients. It proposes several heuristics for solving the generalized problem and shows their…Tue, 18 Feb 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-02-16-paper-at-oopsla-2025/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-02-16-paper-at-oopsla-2025/The paper entitled “Foundations for Deductive Verification of Continuous Probabilistic Programs: From Lebesgue to Riemann and Back” by Kevin Batz, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Francesca Randone (University of Trieste), and Tobias Winkler has been accepted for the International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Application (OOPSLA 2025). The paper presents a new technique to formally check bounds on the expected outcomes of probabilistic programs with continuous uniform…Sun, 16 Feb 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-01-30-new-dfg-weave-project/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-01-30-new-dfg-weave-project/The DFG together with the FNRS (Belgium) have granted the project, entitled “Mixing Formal Methods and Learning Techniques for Strategy Synthesis in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes” for a period of three years. This project is a collaboration with the research group of Jean-Francois Raskin (Universite de Libre Bruxelles).Thu, 30 Jan 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-01-27-paper-in-usenix-security/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2025-01-27-paper-in-usenix-security/The paper “CERTPHASH: Towards Certified Perceptual Hashing via Robust Training” by Yuchen Yang (Johns Hopkins University), Qichang Liu (Tsinghua University), Christopher Brix, Huan Zhang (UIUC), and Yinzhi Cao (Johns Hopkins University) has been accepted for publication in the 34th USENIX Security Symposium. The paper proposes a novel technique to train neural networks to perform perceptual hashing (used to filter illicit images). Crucially, the networks are trained to be robust under evasion…Mon, 27 Jan 2025 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-12-23-paper-in-jair-2/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-12-23-paper-in-jair-2/The paper entitled “An Oracle-Guided Approach to Constrained Policy Synthesis Under Uncertainty” by Roman Andriushchenko, Milan Češka, Filip Macák (Brno University of Technology), Sebastian Junges (Radboud University) and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). The paper present coloured Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) which describes a collection of possible policy configurations with their structural dependencies. The…Mon, 23 Dec 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-12-22-paper-at-fossacs-2025/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-12-22-paper-at-fossacs-2025/The paper entitled “Quantifier Elimination and Craig Interpolation: The Quantitative Way” by Kevin Batz, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Nora Orhan has been accepted at the FoSSaCS 2025 Conference (Hamilton, Canada). This paper gives a quantifier elimination algorithm for quantitative formulas as they e.g. occur in the analysis of probabilistic programs, and present a theorem for a quantitative version of Craig interpolants.Sun, 22 Dec 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-12-22-paper-at-tacas-2025/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-12-22-paper-at-tacas-2025/The paper entitled “Fixed Point Certificates for Reachability and Expected Rewards in MDPs” by Tim Quatmann, Maximilian Schäffeler (TU Munich), Maximilian Weininger (ISTA), Tobias Winkler, Daniel Zilken and Krishnendu Chatterjee (ISTA) has been accepted at the 31st International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS 2025), to be held in Hamilton, Canada. This paper introduces novel approaches to certify reachability and expected rewards in MDPs.Sun, 22 Dec 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-12-20-paper-at-aamas-2025/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-12-20-paper-at-aamas-2025/The paper entitled “Robust Strategies for Stochastic Multi-Agent Systems” by Raphael Berthon, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Munyque Mittelmann, and Aniello Murano has been accepted as extended abstract at the 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2025), Detroit. The paper presents Probabilistic Alternating-Time Temporal Logic with bounded strategies (PATLb) for stochastic multi-agent systems with uncertainty, and considers robustness in strategy synthesis and…Fri, 20 Dec 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-12-06-paper-at-neurips-2024/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-12-06-paper-at-neurips-2024/The paper “Scalable Neural Network Verification with Branch-and-bound Inferred Cutting Planes” by Duo Zhou (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Christopher Brix, Grani A Hanasusanto (Illinois) and Huan Zhang (Illinois) has been accepted for the Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024) in Vancouver. The paper describes how the branch-and-bound process in neural network verification can be used to extract cuts that reduce verification time by…Fri, 06 Dec 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-11-12-colloquium-on-principles-of-verification/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-11-12-colloquium-on-principles-of-verification/On the occasion of Joost-Pieter Katoen’s 60th birthday, a Colloquium on Principles of Verification was organised on November 7, 2024. It attracted more than 100 participants from all over the world and was opened by welcoming speeches by representatives of both the University of Twente (NL) and RWTH Aachen University. Moreover, it featured eleven scientific talks by renowned international researchers. A highlight was the handing over of no less than three volumes of a Festschrift published by…Tue, 12 Nov 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-11-12-paper-at-popl-2025/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-11-12-paper-at-popl-2025/The paper “A Taxonomy of Hoare-Like Logics: Towards a Holistic View using Predicate Transformers and Kleene Algebras with Top and Tests” by Lena Verscht and Benjamin Kaminski has been accepted for the 52nd ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2025) in Denver. The paper provides an overview of program logics, including Hoare logic and incorrectness logic, and discusses their relationships under assumptions such as termination or reversibility.Tue, 12 Nov 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-07-30-paper-at-reachability-problems-2024/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-07-30-paper-at-reachability-problems-2024/The paper “Markov Decision Processes with Sure Parity and Multiple Reachability Objectives” by Raphaël Berthon, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Tobias Winkler has been accepted for the 18th Int. Conference on Reachability Problems (RP 2024) in Vienna. The paper presents new algorithms and complexity bounfs to achieve one sure parity condition and several quantitative threshold objectives on Markov decision processes.Tue, 30 Jul 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-06-21-paper-at-concur-2024/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-06-21-paper-at-concur-2024/The paper entitled “A Spectrum of Approximate Probabilistic Bisimulations” by Timm Spork (TU Dresden), Christel Baier (TU Dresden), Joost-Pieter Katoen, Jakob Piribauer (TU Dresden) and Tim Quatmann has been accepted for the 35th Int. Conf. on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR) in Calgary, Canada. The paper compares several different (and some new) notions of approximate strong and weak approximate probabilistic bisimulation relations and relates them.Fri, 21 Jun 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-04-11-etaps-best-paper-award/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-04-11-etaps-best-paper-award/The paper entitled “Accurately Computing Expected Visiting Times and Stationary Distributions in Markov Chains” by Hannah Mertens, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Tim Quatmann and Tobias Winkler has received the EAPLS (Eur. Association of Programming Languages) Best Paper Award@ETAPS 2024. The paper provides efficient and scalable algorithms to compute expected visiting times in Markov chains, and shows how this can be used to compute reachability probabilities, stationary distributions and conditional…Thu, 11 Apr 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-03-21-leopoldina/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-03-21-leopoldina/Joost-Pieter Katoen has been elected as member of Leopoldina, the German Academy of Sciences. This academy was established in 1652 and is the oldest academy in the world. Katoen is the first computer scienttist from RWTH Aachen University in Leopoldina and the 15th RWTH member of Leopoldina ever. See also press announcements: https://www.rwth-aachen.de/cms/root/Die-RWTH/Aktuell/Pressemitteilungen/Maerz-2024/~bgppks/Joost-Pieter-Katoen-in-die-Leopoldina-au/lidx/1/ and…Thu, 21 Mar 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-02-24-paper-at-oopsla-2024/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-02-24-paper-at-oopsla-2024/The paper entitled “Exact Bayesian Inference for Loopy Probabilistic Programs Using Generating Functions” by Lutz Klinkenberg, Christian Blumenthal, Mingshuai Chen, Darion Haase and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the Conference Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications 2024 (OOPSLA). The paper presents a novel exact inference technique for discrete probabilistic programs with unbounded loops and conditioning. It uses probability generating functions to do…Sat, 24 Feb 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-02-13-nomination-for-etaps-2024-best-paper-award/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-02-13-nomination-for-etaps-2024-best-paper-award/The paper “Accurately Computing Expected Visiting Times and Stationary Distributions in Markov Chains” by Hannah Mertens, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Tim Quatmann and Tobias Winkler has been nominated for one of the ETAPS 2024 best paper awards. (For Tim, this is the second year in a row to be nominated for such an award.)Tue, 13 Feb 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-01-18-erc-proof-of-concept-granted/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2024-01-18-erc-proof-of-concept-granted/The ERC has granted the Proof-of-Concept proposal VERIPROB (A Deductive Verifier for Probabilistic Programs) by Joost-Pieter Katoen. The grant will enables the further development of Caesar, a verifier vor weakest precondition-reasoning on probabilistic programs.Thu, 18 Jan 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-12-22-two-papers-at-tacas/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-12-22-two-papers-at-tacas/The papers “Accurately Computing Expected Visiting Times and Stationary Distributions in Markov Chains” by Hannah Mertens, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Tim Quatmann and Tobias Winkler and “Learning Explainable and Better Performing Representations of POMDP Strategies” by Alexander Bork, Debraj Chakraborty, Kush Grover, Jan Kretinsky and Stefanie Mohr have both been accepted at TACAS 2024 in Luxemburg. The first paper presents new and efficient algorithms for computing expected visited times in…Fri, 22 Dec 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-12-10-paper-at-aaai-2024/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-12-10-paper-at-aaai-2024/The paper entitled “Natural Strategic Ability in Stochastic Multi-Agent Systems” by Raphael Berthon, Monyque Myttelmann, Antoniello Murano and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2024) in Vancouver, Canada. The paper present complexity result on the model checking of the probabilistic alternating temporal logics PATL and PATL∗ under natural strategies on probabilistic multi-agent systems.Sun, 10 Dec 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-11-16-two-papers-at-dafny-2024/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-11-16-two-papers-at-dafny-2024/Two papers were accepted at the Dafny 2024 workshop. The paper “Caesar: A Verifier for Probabilistic Programs” by Philipp Schröer, Kevin Batz, Benjamin Kaminski (Saarland University and UCL), Joost-Pieter Katoen and Christoph Matheja (TU Denmark) presents a quantitative program verification infrastructure for discrete probabilistic programs, building on our work published at OOPSLA 2023. The paper “Generation of Verified Assembly Code Using Dafny and Reinforcement Learning” by Christopher Brix…Thu, 16 Nov 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-11-15-tim-quatmann-wins-a-ki-starter-grant/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-11-15-tim-quatmann-wins-a-ki-starter-grant/Tim Quatmann has been awarded a KI-Starter Grant for his project proposal “Verifying AI Systems under Partial Observability“. The KI-Starter Grant is an initiative of the State North-Rhine Westphalia to strengthen its position in AI and in particular stimulates young researchers in their academic career. Tim’s project focuses on the automated verification using model checking of partially observable probabilistic models. The aim is to obtain safer, more reliable, and trustworthy AI agents that…Wed, 15 Nov 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-11-07-paper-at-popl-2024/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-11-07-paper-at-popl-2024/The paper entitled “Programmatic Strategy Synthesis: Resolving Nondeterminism in Probabilistic Programs” by Kevin Batz, Tom Biskup, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Tobias Winkler has been accepted at the 51st ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2024). The paper shows how to use deductive verification to resolve pure nondeterminism in probabilistic programs such that the obtained determinized program satisfies a given quantitative specification.Tue, 07 Nov 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-11-07-paper-in-lmcs-journal/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-11-07-paper-in-lmcs-journal/The paper entitled “Model Checking Temporal Properties of Recursive Probabilistic Programs” by Tobias Winkler, Christina Gehnen and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the special issues devoted to FoSSaCS 2022 in the journal Logical Methods in Computer Science. The paper shows that model checking a probabilistic pushdown automata against omega visibly push-down languages (e.g., expressed as CaReT formulas) is decidable. It also provides some complexity bounds on this problem.Tue, 07 Nov 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-11-06-berthold-vocking-master-award-2023/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-11-06-berthold-vocking-master-award-2023/Tom Biskup has received the Berthold Vöcking Master Award 2023 for his thesis “Invariant-based Strategy Synthesis for Nondeterministic Probabilistic Programs”. The thesis addresses the problem of making provably good decisions in face of stochastic uncertainty which is key in, e.g., complex planning tasks. Tom’s solution draws on well-known principles from deductive program verification such as loop invariants.Mon, 06 Nov 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-10-27-distinguished-artifact-at-oopsla-2023/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-10-27-distinguished-artifact-at-oopsla-2023/The paper “A Deductive Verification Infrastructure for Probabilistic Programs” by Philipp Schröer, Kevin Batz, Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Christoph Matheja received a distinguished artifact award at OOPSLA 2023. The artifact consists of the deductive verifier Caesar together with a couple of benchmark examples. Caesar has a website at www.caesarverifier.org where the tool can be downloaded and documentation is provided.Fri, 27 Oct 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-09-29-paper-in-fmsd-journal-4/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-09-29-paper-in-fmsd-journal-4/The paper entitled “Parameter Synthesis for Markov Models” by Sebastian Junges, Erika Abraham, Christian Hensel, Nils Jansen, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Tim Quatmann, and Matthias Volk has been accepted for publication in the journal Formal Methods in System Design. The paper gives a comprehensive overview of several synthesis problems on parametric Markov chains and MDPs, presents algorithms for them, and reports on experimental results.Fri, 29 Sep 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-09-28-kps-2023/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-09-28-kps-2023/MOVES has successfully organised the 22. Kolloquium Programmiersprachen und Grundlagen der Programmierung (KPS 2023). KPS is a traditional, bi-annual series of workshops for computer scientists from Germany, Austria and Switzerland working on the foundations, design, implementation, and usage of programming languages. This year’s edition featured 41 participants and a scientific programme with 31 presentations.Thu, 28 Sep 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-09-27-paper-in-neurips/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-09-27-paper-in-neurips/The paper entitled “Provably Bounding Neural Network Preimages” by Christopher Brix, Suhas Kotha (CMU), Huan Zhang (UIUC), Zico Kolter (CMU), Krishnamurthy (Dj) Dvijotham (Google DeepMind) has been accepted for publication in the thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. The paper presents a way to compute bounds on the preimage of the output of a neural network by transforming the problem such that it can be optimized by state-of-the-art tools for the forward…Wed, 27 Sep 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-08-31-vacancies/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-08-31-vacancies/Our group has to offer two PhD positions in Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Quantum Systems Integration at RWTH Aachen University. The first is about formal methods for supporting the development of zero-defect quantum programs, while the second aims to provide a systematic framework for compiling quantum software to computing architectures featuring qubit shuttling. For details, please refer to the respective job posting.Thu, 31 Aug 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-07-30-paper-in-jair/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-07-30-paper-in-jair/The paper entitled “Automatically Finding the Right Probabilities in Bayesian Networks” by Bahare Salmani and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. The paper presents a way to use probabilistic model checking to perform inference on Bayesian networks (BNs) and find suitable parameter values in the case of parametric BNs. The approach improves upon the state of the art by—most importantly—being able to handle an unbounded number…Sun, 30 Jul 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-07-03-paper-at-oopsla-2023/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-07-03-paper-at-oopsla-2023/The paper entitled “A Deductive Verification Infrastructure for Probabilistic Programs” by Philipp Schröer, Kevin Batz, Benjamin Kaminski (Saarland University and UCL), Joost-Pieter Katoen and Christoph Matheja (TU Denmark) has been accepted for publication at OOPSLA 2023. The paper presents a quantitative program verification infrastructure for discrete probabilistic programs. This infrastructure can be viewed as the probabilistic analogue of Boogie: its central components are an intermediate…Mon, 03 Jul 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-06-19-paper-in-fmsd-journal-3/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-06-19-paper-in-fmsd-journal-3/The paper “Parameter Synthesis for Markov Models: Covering the Parameter Space” by Sebastian Junges (Nijmegen), Erika Abraham, Christian Hensel (Amazon), Nils Jansen (Nijmegen), Joost-Pieter Katoen, Tim Quatmann and Matthias Volk (Twente) has been accepted for publication in the journal Formal Methods in Systems Design. The paper (85 pages) presents various analysis algorithms for parametric discrete-time Marko chains and Markov decision processes. We focus on three problems: (a) do all…Mon, 19 Jun 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-05-25-jean-claude-laprie-award/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-05-25-jean-claude-laprie-award/The Jean-Claude Laprie Award 2023 in Dependable Computing has been awarded to the paper “Model-checking algorithms for continuous-time Markov chains”, authored by Christel Baier, Boudewijn Haverkort, Holger Hermanns, and Joost-Pieter Katoen, and published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2003. It presents a unifying theory and algorithm to evaluate a wide variety of performance and dependability measures for continuous-time Markov chain models. More information can be found here.…Thu, 25 May 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-05-03-paper-at-esrel-2023/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-05-03-paper-at-esrel-2023/The paper entitled “SAFEST: the static and dynamic fault tree analysis tool” by Matthias Volk (Twente), Muzammil Ibne Irshad (DGB), Joost-Pieter Katoen, Falak Sher (DGB), Marielle Stoelinga (Twente) and Ahmad Zafar (DGB) has been accepted for presentation at the European Conference On Safety And Reliability (ESREL) 2023 in Southampton, UK. The paper presents a powerful software tool equipped with a professional GUI for the modelling and analysis of static and dynamic fault trees. Under the…Wed, 03 May 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-04-26-paper-at-cav-2023/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-04-26-paper-at-cav-2023/The paper entitled “Search and Explore: Symbiotic Policy Synthesis in POMDPs” by Roman Andriushchenko (Brno University of Technology), Alexander Bork, Milan Ceska (Brno), Sebastian Junges (Radboud University, Netherlands), Joost-Pieter Katoen and Filip Macak (Brno) has been accepted for presentation at the 33th Conference on Computer-Aided Verification in Paris. The paper presents a symbiotic anytime algorithm that tightly integrates a belief-based and an inductive approach for finite-state…Wed, 26 Apr 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-04-19-paper-at-ijcai-2023/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-04-19-paper-at-ijcai-2023/The paper entitled “Finding an ϵ-Close Minimal Variation of Parameters in Bayesian Networks” by Bahare Salmani and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for presentation at IJCAI 2023 (the 32nd Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence) in Macao. Out of 4566 full-paper submissions, about 15% has been accepted. The paper gives an algorithm for estimating the sensitivity of a given fully-specified Bayesian network to small perturbations in the values of local conditional probabilities.Wed, 19 Apr 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-04-05-paper-at-lics-2023/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-04-05-paper-at-lics-2023/The paper entitled “On Certificates, Expected Runtimes, and Termination in Probabilistic Pushdown Automata” by Tobias Winkler and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for presentation at the IEEE/ACM Annual Symposium on Logic on Computer Science 2023 to be held in Boston. The paper studies certification of numerical characteristics of probabilistic pushdown systems, that is, how one can witness that the termination probability (or expected running time) is above/below a certain threshold.Wed, 05 Apr 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-03-21-paper-in-ieee-tdsc/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-03-21-paper-in-ieee-tdsc/The paper entitled “A Compositional Semantics of Boolean-logic Driven Markov Processes” by Shahid Khan, Joost-Pieter Katoen andMarc Bouissou (EDF) has been accepted as regular paper for IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. This paper provides a compositional and operational semantics (using Markov automata) of BDMPs, a prominent dynamic extension of static fault trees to model repairable and complex dynamic systems.Tue, 21 Mar 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-03-01-proceedings-25th-fm-symposium/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-03-01-proceedings-25th-fm-symposium/The proceedings of the 25th Symposium on Formal Methods (FM 2023), edited by Marsha Chechik (Toronto), Joost-Pieter Katoen and Martin Leucker (Lübeck), and published as LNCS volume 14000, are available from March 2 and accessible under: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-27481-7.Wed, 01 Mar 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-02-28-dfg-project-proposal-granted/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-02-28-dfg-project-proposal-granted/The project proposal “Probabilistic Model Checking under Partial Observability with Multiple Objectives” (POMPOM) has been granted for funding by the German Research Council. The project aims to develop new model-checking algorithms for combinations of qualitative, stochastic and total expected reward objectives for partially observable Markov decision processes (and games). The funding is for two years and Raphael Berthon, a former PhD student of Jean-Francois Raskin and Guillermo Perez, will…Tue, 28 Feb 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-02-08-paper-in-fmsd-journal-2/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2023-02-08-paper-in-fmsd-journal-2/The paper entitled “Stochastic Games with Lexicographic Objectives” by Krishnendu Chatterjee (IST Austria), Joost-Pieter Katoen, Stephanie Moor (TU Munich), Maximilian Weininger (Tu Munich), and Tobias Winkler has been accepted for publication in Formal Methods in System Design. This paper presents a detailed study of stochastic turn-based games (SG) with lexicographic objectives. The paper is an extended version of CAV’20 paper providing new results on lexicographic omega-regular objectives in…Wed, 08 Feb 2023 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-12-27-three-papers-at-tacas-2023/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-12-27-three-papers-at-tacas-2023/Three papers of the MOVES group have been accepted for TACAS 2023! “A Practitioner’s Guide to MDP Model Checking Algorithms” by Arnd Hartmanns, Sebastian Junges, Tim Quatmann and Maximilian Weininger presents an empirical evaluation of various algorithms (different forms of value iteration, policy iteration and direct algorithms) to compute reachability probabilities in Markov decision processes. “Probabilistic Program Verification via Inductive Synthesis of Inductive Invariants” by Kevin Batz,…Tue, 27 Dec 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-11-25-journal-paper-at-sttt-explain/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-11-25-journal-paper-at-sttt-explain/The paper entitled “First Three Years of the International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP)” by Christopher Brix, Mark Müller (ETH Zurich), Stanley Bak (Stony Brook University), Taylor T Johnson (Vanderbilt University), and Changliu Liu (Carnegie Mellon University) has been accepted for publication in the journal STTT ExPLAIn. The paper summarizes the organization and results from 2020 to 2022 of the VNN-COMP, where the performance of tools designed for the verification of…Fri, 25 Nov 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-11-08-paper-at-popl-2023/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-11-08-paper-at-popl-2023/The paper entitled “A Calculus for Amortized Expected Runtimes” by Kevin Batz, Benjamin Kaminski (Saarland/UCL), Joost-Pieter Katoen, Christoph Matheja (DTU Lyngby) and Lena Verscht has been accepted for presentation at the 50th ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL). The paper presents a weakest precondition-style calculus to determine the amortized expected run-time of randomized algorithms that manipulate dynamic data structures such as trees and lists.Tue, 08 Nov 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-10-11-whatsapp-research-award/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-10-11-whatsapp-research-award/Philipp Schroer and Joost-Pieter Katoen receive a Research Award from WhatsApp, through its parent company, Meta Platforms, Inc. for their research proposal “A Deductive Verification Infrastructure for Probabilistic Programs”. Out of 62 research proposals that were submitted to WhatsApp Privacy Aware Program Analysis, 6 projects have been awarded. For more information, see here.Tue, 11 Oct 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-09-21-paper-in-information-computation-2/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-09-21-paper-in-information-computation-2/The paper entitled “Encoding inductive invariants as barrier certificates: synthesis via difference-of-convex programming” by Qiuye Wang, Mingshuai Chen, Bai Xue, Naijun Zhan, and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for publication in the journal Information and Computation. The paper presents a novel condition on barrier certificates that witnesses unbounded-time safety of differential dynamical systems and provides algorithms to check these conditions. (This is an extended version of paper…Wed, 21 Sep 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-08-23-journal-paper-in-fmsd-2/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-08-23-journal-paper-in-fmsd-2/The paper entitled “The Probabilistic Termination Tool Amber” by Ezio Bartocci, Marcel Moosbrugger, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Laura Kovacs has been accepted in a special issue devoted to the Formal Methods Symposium 2021 in the journal Formal Methods in System Design. The paper describes a tool that can automatically check whether a probabilistic program (of a particular shape) is (positive) almost surely terminating, or not.Tue, 23 Aug 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-08-21-journal-paper-in-fmsd/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-08-21-journal-paper-in-fmsd/The paper entitled “Stochastic Games with Lexicographic Objectives” by Krishnendu Chatterjee (IST), Joost-Pieter Katoen, Stephanie Mohr (TUM), Maximilain Weininger (TUM) and Tobias Winkler has been accepted fior publication in special issue devoted to CAV 2020 in the journal Formal Methods in System Design. The paper considers presents a detailed study of stochastic turn-based games (SG) with lexicographic objectives and provides new results on lexicographic omega-regular objectives in Markov…Sun, 21 Aug 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-07-26-paper-in-journal-of-the-acm-2/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-07-26-paper-in-journal-of-the-acm-2/The paper entitled “Generative Datalog with Continuous Distributions” by Martin Grohe, Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Peter Lindner has been accepted in Journal of the ACM. The paper defines a formal semantics (based on stochastic kernels and Markov processes) of a probabilistic version of the Datalog querying language for probabilistic databases storing data with continuous distributions.Tue, 26 Jul 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-07-01-paper-at-oopsla-2022-2/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-07-01-paper-at-oopsla-2022-2/The paper entitled “Reasoning about Distributed Reconfigurable Systems” by Emma Ahrens (RWTH), Marius Bozga (Grenoble), Radu Iosif (Grenoble) and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for presentation at the ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2022) in Auckland, New Zealand. The paper presents a resource-based program logic for (local) reasoning about safety properties of distributed reconfigurable systems. This is the second paper with an…Fri, 01 Jul 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-06-26-paper-at-concur-2022/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-06-26-paper-at-concur-2022/The paper entitled “Towards Concurrent Quantitative Separation Logic” by Ira Fesefeldt, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Thomas Noll has been accepted at the 33rd International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR), to be held in Warsaw. The paper proposes a variant of Quantitative Separation Logic (QSL) for reasoning about concurrent probabilistic programs.Sun, 26 Jun 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-06-24-paper-at-fmics-2022/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-06-24-paper-at-fmics-2022/The paper entitled “Analysing Capacity Bottlenecks in Rail Infrastructure by Episode Mining” by Th. Noll, J. Berger (both MOVES), W. Lenze, B. Kogel (both Institute of Transport Science, RWTH Aachen University), S. Schotten, Th. Büker (both quattron management consulting GmbH), and M. Fietze (German Centre for Rail Traffic Research) has been accepted for presentation at the 27th International Conference on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS 2022) in Warsaw, Poland. It…Fri, 24 Jun 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-06-24-paper-at-railways-2022/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-06-24-paper-at-railways-2022/The paper entitled “Identification of bottlenecks in rail infrastructure” by W. Lenze, B. Kogel (both Institute of Transport Science, RWTH Aachen University), S. Schotten, Th. Büker (both quattron management consulting GmbH), Th. Noll, J. Berger (both MOVES) and M. Fietze (German Centre for Rail Traffic Research) has been accepted for presentation at the 5th International Conference on Railway Technology: Research, Development and Maintenance (RAILWAYS 2022) in Montpellier, France. It presents…Fri, 24 Jun 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-06-21-paper-at-qest-2022/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-06-21-paper-at-qest-2022/The paper entitled “POMDP Controllers With Optimal Budget” by Jip Spel, Svenja Stein and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for presentation at the 18th International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems (QEST) in Warsaw, Poland. The paper tackles the problem of finding “almost optimal” valuations for parametric Markov chains, such that the expected reward to reach a target set is minimised, and applies them to controller synthesis in POMDPs.Tue, 21 Jun 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-05-17-paper-at-uai-2022/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-05-17-paper-at-uai-2022/The paper entitled “Inductive Synthesis of Finite-State Controllers for POMDPs” by Roman Andriushchenko_,_ Milan Ceska_,_ Sebastian Junges_,_ Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the 38th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The paper was one of the 230 accepted papers out of 718 submissions. The paper proposes an inductive synthesis-based approach for the synthesis of finite memory controllers for indefinite-horizon reachability of…Tue, 17 May 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-05-12-member-akw-nrw/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-05-12-member-akw-nrw/The North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts has elected Joost-Pieter Katoen as ordinary member. Katoen is the third computer scientist from RWTH Aachen University that has become a member of AKW-NRW. The other CS members are Wil van der Aalst and Leif Kobbelt.Thu, 12 May 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-05-12-paper-in-sttt-2/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-05-12-paper-in-sttt-2/The paper entitled “Scenario-Based Verification of Uncertain Parametric MDPs” by Thom Badings, Nils Jansen, and Sebastian Junges (all Radboud University Nijmegen, NL), Murat Cubuktepe and Ufuk Topcu (UT Austin, USA) and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted in the International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (special issue devoted to TACAS 2020). The paper focuses on the problem to provide the probability estimation of the existence of a policy that satisfies certain…Thu, 12 May 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-05-11-concur-test-of-time-award/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-05-11-concur-test-of-time-award/With great pleasure, we announce that the paper entitled “Approximate symbolic model checking of continuous-time Markov chains” by Christel Baier, Holger Hermanns and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been selected for the CONCUR Test-of-Time Award. The purpose of the award is to recognize important achievements in Concurrency Theory that were published at the CONCUR conference and have stood the test of time. The paper was one of the two selected papers from the period 1998-2001. The paper provided a…Wed, 11 May 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-05-09-successful-dissertation-defense/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-05-09-successful-dissertation-defense/On April 28, Matthias Volk successfully defended his PhD dissertation entitled: “Dynamic Fault Trees: Analysis, Semantics, and Applications” for a jury consisting of the external examinar Allessandro Cimatti (FBK Trento, IT), the examiner Wil van der Aalst, supervisor Joost-Pieter Katoen and chairman Stefan Kowalewski. The dissertation provides a formal DFT semantics by means of generalized stochastic Petri nets, proves that this semantics coincides with a simple event trace semantics, and…Mon, 09 May 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-05-04-paper-at-cav-2022/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-05-04-paper-at-cav-2022/The paper entitled “Does a Program Yield the Right Distribution? Verifying Probabilistic Programs via Generating Functions” by Mingshuai Chen, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Lutz Klinkenberg and Tobias Winkler has been accepted at CAV 2022 (Computer-Aided Verification). Out of 209 submissions, 40 regular papers have been accepted at CAV 2022. The paper leverages probability generating functions to prove that a loopy probabilistic program is equivalent to a straight-line program. It is shown that for a…Wed, 04 May 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-03-15-two-papers-at-nfm-2022/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2022-03-15-two-papers-at-nfm-2022/The paper “BDDs Strike Back: Efficient Analysis of Static and Dynamic Fault Trees” by Daniel Basgöze, Matthias Volk (Twente), Joost-Pieter Katoen, Shahid Khan and Marielle Stoelinga (Twente) as well as the paper “Configurable Benchmarks for C Model Checkers” by Xaver Fink, Philipp Berger and Joost-Pieter Katoen have been accepted for presentation at the NASA Formal Methods Symposium 2022 at CalTech, Pasadena. The first paper reports on a technique to analyze “static” parts of a dynamic fault…Tue, 15 Mar 2022 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-12-30-paper-at-tacas-2022/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-12-30-paper-at-tacas-2022/The paper entitled “Under-Approximating Expected Total Rewards in POMDPs” by Alexander Bork, Tim Quatmann and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the 28th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS). The paper has also successfully passed all aspects of the artifact evaluation. The paper presents a novel algorithm to under-approximate the expected total reward until reaching a given target state in a POMDP.Thu, 30 Dec 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-12-23-paper-at-esop-2022/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-12-23-paper-at-esop-2022/The paper entitled “Foundations for Entailment Checking in Quantitative Separation Logic” by Kevin Batz, Ira Fesefeldt, Marvin Jansen, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Florian Keßler, Christoph Matheja and Thomas Noll has been accepted for ESOP 2022, the 31st European Symposium on Programming. The paper presents the first results on decidability and complexity for entailment checking in quantitative separation logic and is an important step towards automation of verifying randomised algorithms manipulating…Thu, 23 Dec 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-12-23-paper-at-fossacs-2022/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-12-23-paper-at-fossacs-2022/The paper entitled “ Model Checking Temporal Properties of Recursive Probabilistic Programs" by Tobias Winkler, Christina Gehnen and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted at the 25th Int. Conf. on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structure (FoSSaCS 2022). The paper presents decidability and complexity results for checking quantitative properties of visibly omega-regular languages against probabilistic visibly pushdown automata. It enables the automated verification of temporal…Thu, 23 Dec 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-12-17-paper-at-oopsla-2022/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-12-17-paper-at-oopsla-2022/The paper entitled “Weighted Programming: A Programming Paradigm for Specifying Mathematical Models” by Kevin Batz, Adrian Gallus, Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Tobias Winkler has been accepted for OOPSLA 2022, which will be held as part of the ACM Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH’22). The papers develops weakest-precondition- and weakest-liberal-precondition-style calculi à la Dijkstra for reasoning about mathematical…Fri, 17 Dec 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-11-14-rtg-unravel-extended/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-11-14-rtg-unravel-extended/The DFG has granted the RTG 2236 UnRAVeL (Uncertainty and Randomness in Algorithms, Verification and Logic) an extension to 2026. The research training group has been granted 12 PhD positions as well as 10 student-assistant position to continue our research. The second phase of UnRAVeL involves 12 PIs from CS, Mechanical Engineering, Business Economics, and Railway Engineering.Sun, 14 Nov 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-11-07-paper-in-ieee-tac-2/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-11-07-paper-in-ieee-tac-2/The paper “Convex Optimization for Parameter Synthesis in MDPs” by Murat Cubuktepe, Nils Jansen, Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Ufuk Topcu has been accepted for publication in the journal IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (impact factor 5,8). This paper formulates the feasibility problem for parametric MDPs (pMDPs) problem as a non-convex quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP) and develops two different solution procedures: sequential convex programming (SCP) and…Sun, 07 Nov 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-10-17-paper-in-distributed-computing/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-10-17-paper-in-distributed-computing/The paper entitled “Synthesizing Optimal Bias in Randomized Self-Stabilization Algorithms” by Matthias Volk, Borzoo Bonakdarpour, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Saha Aflaki has been accepted for publication in the journal Distributed Computing. It presents a parameter-synthesis technique to automatically determine optimal biases of coin flips in randomised self-stabilisation algorithms.Sun, 17 Oct 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-10-15-two-papers-at-vmcai-2022/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-10-15-two-papers-at-vmcai-2022/Two papers of the MOVES group have been accepted at VMCAI 2022. The paper entitled “Out of Control: Reducing Probabilistic Models by Control-State Elimination” by Tobias Winkler, Johannes Lehmann and Joost-Pieter Katoen presents a static-analysis technique for reducing finite-state probabilistic models in the PRISM modeling language. The paper entitled “Gradient-Descent for Randomized Controllers under Partial Observability” by Jip Spel, Linus Heck, Sebastian Junges, Joshua Moerman and…Fri, 15 Oct 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-09-26-paper-at-sefm-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-09-26-paper-at-sefm-2021/The tool paper entitled “A Debugger for Probabilistic Programs” by Alexander Hoppen and Thomas Noll has been accepted for presentation at the 19th International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2021). The paper presents both a theoretical foundation and a prototype implementation of a recording-based debugger for imperative probabilistic programs supporting randomised choice, conditioning, and loops.Sun, 26 Sep 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-09-24-paper-at-ladc-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-09-24-paper-at-ladc-2021/The paper entitled “Modelling and Analysis of Fire Sprinklers by Verifying Dynamic Fault Trees” by Shahid Khan, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Matthias Volk, Ahmad Zafar and Falak Sher has been accepted for presentation at the 10th Latin-American Symposium on Dependable Computing (LADC 2021). The paper models fire sprinkler systems in shopping centers by dynamic fault trees and analyses them using probabilistic model checking.Fri, 24 Sep 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-09-16-paper-at-prdc-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-09-16-paper-at-prdc-2021/The paper entitled “Synergising Reliability Modelling Languages: BDMPs and Repairable DFTs” by Shahid Khan and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for presentation at PRDC 2021, the IEEE Pacific Rim Dependability Conference. The paper proposes a translation from Boussiou’s BDMPs to repairable DFTs so as to use the repair mechanism of BDMP in rDFT. The validity of the translation is provided through the analysis using the probabilistic model-checking tool storm.Thu, 16 Sep 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-09-16-paper-in-sttt-journal/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-09-16-paper-in-sttt-journal/The paper entitled “DFT Modeling Approach for Operational Risk Assessment of Railway Infrastructure” by Matthias Volk, Norman Weik (DLR), Nils Nießen, and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for publication in the journal Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT). The paper is an extension of the FMICS 2019 paper (awarded the best paper award) and presents a fully automated manner for risk assessment of railway station infrastructural elements.Thu, 16 Sep 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-08-10-paper-at-gandalf-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-08-10-paper-at-gandalf-2021/The paper entitled “Stochastic Games with Disjunctions of Multiple Objectives” by Tobias Winkler and Maxi Weininger (TU Munich) has been accepted for the Twelfth International Symposium on Games, Automata, Logics, and Formal Verification (GandALF 2021). The paper provides new results on stochastic two-player games with disjunctive objectives given by an alternative of threshold conditions for the probability of reachability (or safety) conditions.Tue, 10 Aug 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-07-18-paper-at-fm2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-07-18-paper-at-fm2021/The tool paper “The Probabilistic Termination Tool Amber” by Marcel Moosbrugger, Ezio Bartocci, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Laura Kovacs has been accpted to FM2021, the conference on Formal Methods. The paper presents the first tool that automates the checking whether a probabilistic program is AST, PAST, non-AST, non-PAST, or “don’t know”. (AST = almost-sure termination, PAST = positive AST).Sun, 18 Jul 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-07-13-distinguished-paper-at-lics-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-07-13-distinguished-paper-at-lics-2021/The paper “Orbit-Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces and Weighted Register Automata ” by Mikołaj Bojańczyk, Bartek Klin (both Warsaw Univ.) and Joshua Moerman was selected as Distinguished Paper at LICS 2021, the 36th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science.Tue, 13 Jul 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-06-26-award-for-outstanding-bachelors-thesis/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-06-26-award-for-outstanding-bachelors-thesis/Christina Gehnen has received an award from the Fachgruppe Informatik at RWTH for her Bachelor’s thesis entitled “Automata-based Model Checking of Recursive Systems“. Congratulations!Sat, 26 Jun 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-06-23-paper-at-ecsqaru-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-06-23-paper-at-ecsqaru-2021/The paper entitled “Fine-Tuning the Odds for Bayes Networks” by Bahare Salmani and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the 16th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty (ECSQARU 2021). The paper proposes the usage of parameter synthesis techniques for Markov chains to analyse Bayesian networks with symbolic parameters in the conditional probability tables, and experimentally compares this to existing analysis tools for Bayesian networks.Wed, 23 Jun 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-06-23-paper-at-ictac-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-06-23-paper-at-ictac-2021/The paper entitled “Accelerating SpMV Multiplication in Probabilistic Model Checkers using GPUs” by Muhammad Hannan Khan (NUST), Osman Hasan (NUST) and Shahid Khan has been accepted at the 18th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing (ICTAC 2021). The paper introduces a GPU-based methodolgy to improve sparse-matrix vector multiplication in probabilistic model checking. The main contribution is a technique for hiding memory transfers, which represent a major bottleneck in…Wed, 23 Jun 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-06-08-paper-at-qest-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-06-08-paper-at-qest-2021/The paper entitled “Tweaking the Odds in Probabilistic Timed Automata” by Arnd Hartmanns (Twente), Joost-Pieter Katoen, Bram Kohlen (Twente) and Jip Spel has been accepted at the 18th International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems (QEST 2021). The paper shows that two well-known techniques (digital clocks and backward reachability) for probabilistic timed automata (PTA) carry over to PTA with parametric probabilities in a rather starighforward manner. A prototypical tool…Tue, 08 Jun 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-05-28-tool-paper-at-cav-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-05-28-tool-paper-at-cav-2021/The paper “PAYNT: A Tool for Inductive Synthesis of Probabilistic Programs” by Roman Andriushchenko, Milan Ceska, Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Simon Stupinsky has been accepted as tool paper at CAV 2021. The paper passed both the normal paper review as well as the artifact evaluation review. PAYNT is a tool that supports the automated synthesis of finite-state probabilistic programs and supports CEGAR-, CEGIS-, and a mixture of these techniques. This brings the total number of…Fri, 28 May 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-05-15-storm-in-aachener-nachrichten/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-05-15-storm-in-aachener-nachrichten/The newspaper Aachener Nachrichten published the article Storm findet sicherheitskritische Softwarefehler. The article addresses Storm and its applications in industry.Sat, 15 May 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-04-30-paper-at-safecomp-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-04-30-paper-at-safecomp-2021/The paper “A Modular Approach To Non-Deterministic Dynamic Fault Trees” by Sascha Müller, Adeline Jordon, Andreas Gerndt (all German Aerospace Center DLR, Braunschweig) and Thomas Noll has been accepted at the 40th International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security (SafeComp 2021). It presents a modular approach for synthesising recovery strategies from non-deterministic dynamic fault trees.Fri, 30 Apr 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-04-23-two-moves-papers-in-top-5-most-cited-papers-at-cav-2015-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-04-23-two-moves-papers-in-top-5-most-cited-papers-at-cav-2015-2021/The papers on the Storm model checker and the parameter synthesis tool Prophesy are both among the five most cited CAV papers in the period 2015-2021. CAV (Computer-Aided Verification) is a flagship conference on automated verification, in particular model checking. More details can be found here: https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?hl=en&vq=eng%5Fcomputerhardwaredesign&view%5Fop=list%5Fhcore&venue=qgBvh59sjMQJ.2020Fri, 23 Apr 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-04-20-paper-at-icgt-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-04-20-paper-at-icgt-2021/The paper “Automated Detection and Completion of Confluence for Graph Grammars” by Ira Fesefeldt, Christoph Matheja, Thomas Noll, and Johannes Schulte has been accepted as a tool paper at the International Conference on Graph Transformation (ICGT 2021). It presents an approach to check for a given context-free graph grammar whether the corresponding backward graph reduction system is confluent—a question that arises when using graph grammars to guide state space abstractions for analyzing…Tue, 20 Apr 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-04-19-two-papers-at-cav-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-04-19-two-papers-at-cav-2021/The papers “Latticed k-Induction with an Application to Probabilistic Programs” by Kevin Batz, Mingshuai Chen, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Christoph Matheja and Philipp Schröer and “Synthesizing Invariant Barrier Certificates via Difference-of-Convex Programming” by Qiuye Wang, Mingshuai Chen, Bai Xue, Naijun Zhan and Joost-Pieter Katoen have both been accepted as regular papers for CAV 2021. The first paper revisits k-induction and bounded model checking (BMC) in the general…Mon, 19 Apr 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-04-06-paper-at-dsn-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-04-06-paper-at-dsn-2021/The paper “Model Checking the Multi-Formalism Language FIGARO” by Shahid Khan, Matthias Volk, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Alexis Braibant and Marc Bouissou has been accepted at the 51st Annual IEEE/IFIP Int. Conf. on Dependable Systems (DSN). The paper presents a tool that enables the probabilistic model checking of FIGARO models and compares this tool to various existing analysis techniques. The FIGARO language family includes e.g., stochastic Petri nets, reliability block diagrams, and Boolean…Tue, 06 Apr 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-04-06-paper-at-lics-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-04-06-paper-at-lics-2021/The paper entitled “Orbit-Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces and Weighted Register Automata” by Mikołaj Bojańczyk, Bartek Klin and Joshua Moerman has been accepted at LICS 2021. This paper introduces a new model, weighted register automata, and shows that it has good decidability properties and that is defines a robust class of languages. This class of automata captures unambiguous register automata as well as probabilistic register automata.Tue, 06 Apr 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-03-09-paper-in-faoc-journal/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-03-09-paper-in-faoc-journal/The paper entitled “Counterexample-Guided Inductive Synthesis for Probabilistic Systems” by Milan Ceska, Christian Hensel, Sebastian Junges and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the Formal Aspects of Computing journal. The paper presents a CEGIS approach to, mongst others, the sketching of probabilistic programs.Tue, 09 Mar 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-03-05-storm-runner-up-in-rwth-innovation-award-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-03-05-storm-runner-up-in-rwth-innovation-award-2020/The Storm model checker received the second place at the RWTH Innovation Award 2020. An official announcement can be found here whereas a youtube video of the three winners is here (watch until the end).Fri, 05 Mar 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-03-02-paper-in-jcss-journal/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-03-02-paper-in-jcss-journal/The paper entitled “The Complexity of Reachability in Parametric Markov Decision Processes” by Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Guillermo Perez, and Tobias Winkler is accepted for publication in Journal of Computer and System Sciences. This paper provides several complexity results on parameter synthesis in parametric MDPs.Tue, 02 Mar 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-02-25-paper-at-nfm2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-02-25-paper-at-nfm2021/The paper “Scalable Reliability Analysis by Lazy Verification” by Shahid Khan, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Matthias Volk and Marc Bouissou has been accepted for the 13th NASA Formal Methods (NFM) Symposium. The paper presents an iterative method for the partial analysis of reliability (with repairs) models through lazy verification. The approach yields an upper and a lower bound on the system’s lifetime for a partial state space. The precision can be improved iteratively.Thu, 25 Feb 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-02-14-paper-in-fmsd-journal/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-02-14-paper-in-fmsd-journal/The paper “Markov Automata with Multiple Objectives” by Tim Quatmann, Sebastian Junges and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for publication in Formal Methods in System Design, a special issue for selected papers from CAV 2017. The paper presents several algorithms for automatically verifying multiple timed objectives on Markov automata, an extension of continuous-time Markov chains with non-determinism.Sun, 14 Feb 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-02-10-katoen-member-khmw/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-02-10-katoen-member-khmw/Joost-Pieter Katoen has been elected as new member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. The KHMW was established in 1752 and is the oldest society of sciences in the Netherlands. The official announcement (in Dutch) can be found here: Benoemingen 2021Wed, 10 Feb 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-01-14-katoen-named-acm-fellow/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-01-14-katoen-named-acm-fellow/Prof. Joost-Pieter Katoen has been named ACM Fellow 2020 for his contributions to model checking of software and probabilistic systems. The ACM Fellows program recognizes the top 1% of ACM Members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. Fellows are nominated by their peers, with nominations reviewed by a distinguished selection committee. Katoen belongs to one of the 16 ACM Fellows in…Thu, 14 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-01-13-5-gold-medals-at-rers-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-01-13-5-gold-medals-at-rers-2020/We are happy to announce that our team (Joshua Moerman and Jana Berger) has won 5 gold medals at the RERS challenge 2020. By using a combination of off-the-shelf verification tools, they have managed to crack many of the reachability problems and LTL verification problems. To get more information, please read their report.Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-01-04-three-papers-at-tacas21/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2021-01-04-three-papers-at-tacas21/We are delighted to inform you that three MOVES papers have been accepted at TACAS 2021: “Inductive Synthesis for Probabilistic Programs Reaches New Horizons” by Roman Andriushchenko, Milan Ceska, Sebastian Junges and Joost-Pieter Katoen “Multi-objective Optimization of Long-run Average and Total Rewards” by Tim Quatmann and Joost-Pieter Katoen, and “Finding Provably Optimal Markov Chains” by Jip Spel, Sebastian Junges, and Joost-Pieter KatoenMon, 04 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-12-20-paper-at-esop-2021/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-12-20-paper-at-esop-2021/The paper entitled “Automated Termination Analysis of Polynomial Probabilistic Programs ” by Marcel Moosbrugger, Ezio Bartocci, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Laura Kovács has been accepted for the European Symposium on Programming (ESOP 2021). The paper presents an algebraic approach and the publicly available tool Amber to automatically prove whether a probabilistic programs is almost-surely terminating (or not) or positive almost-surely terminating (or not). It was selected as one of the 24…Sun, 20 Dec 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-12-18-distinguished-popl-2021-paper-award/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-12-18-distinguished-popl-2021-paper-award/We are happy to announce that the paper A Pre-Expectation Calculus for Probabilistic Sensitivity by Alejandro Aguirre, Gilles Barthe, Justin Hsu, Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Christoph Matheja has been selected as distinguished POPL 2021 paper. The paper develops a logic for estimating sensitivity properties (how do changes in the inputs affect the program’s output?) of probabilistic programs.Fri, 18 Dec 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-12-18-job-opportunities-as-student-assistants/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-12-18-job-opportunities-as-student-assistants/We are seeking two talented student assistants to support the digitalisation of online bridging courses in Theoretical Computer Science. More concretely, the following tasks need to be performed: the development and implementation of generators for exercise tasks and Moodle plugins and the creation of new and the preparation of existing learning material in Moodle. More details and contact addresses can be found in this announcement [in German].Fri, 18 Dec 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-12-18-lopstr-2020-best-paper-award/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-12-18-lopstr-2020-best-paper-award/We are happy to announce that the paper “Generating Functions for Probabilistic Programs” by Lutz Klinkenberg, Kevin Batz, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Joshua Moerman and Tobias Winkler has received the best paper award at LOPSTR 2020, the 30th Int. Symp. on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation.Fri, 18 Dec 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-12-04-thesis-awards/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-12-04-thesis-awards/During the virtual Tag der Informatik, two students of our group have been awarded for their final theses. Florian Keßler received the CS Department Award for his bachelor’s thesis On the Decidability of Entailment Checking in Quantitative Separation Logics, while Jan Svejda received the DSA Industrial Award for his master’s thesis entitled Interpretation-Based Violation Witness Validator. Congratulations!Fri, 04 Dec 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-11-29-book-foundations-of-probabilistic-programming-published/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-11-29-book-foundations-of-probabilistic-programming-published/The book “Foundations of Probabilistic Programming”, edited by Gilles Barthe, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Alexandra Silva has been published under gold open access. It contains survey chapters of various leading researchers on formal semantics, verification, analysis and applications of probabilistic programming. Get your free download at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/foundations-of-probabilistic-programming/819623B1B5B33836476618AC0621F0EE#Sun, 29 Nov 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-30-ict-young-researcher-award/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-30-ict-young-researcher-award/On October 30, the ICT Young Researcher Award 2020 has been awarded to Christopher Brix, who did his master thesis entitled Proving Non-Existence of Imperceptible Adversarial Examples in Deep Neural Networks Using Symbolic Propagation With Error Bounds in our group. The award is given to students at Bachelor, Master and Ph.D. level at RWTH Aachen University who make a significant contribution to research in the field of information and communication technologies and thus increase the visibility…Fri, 30 Oct 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-28-ackermann-award-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-28-ackermann-award-2020/Benjamin Kaminski will receive the prestigious 2020 Ackermann Award for his Ph.D. dissertation on “Advanced Weakest Precondition Calculi for Probabilistic Programs” which he defended in February 2019. The Ackermann Award is an annual award by the EACSL (European Association of Computer Science Logic) and is given to an outstanding dissertation in the area “Logic in Computer Science”. More details can be found here.Wed, 28 Oct 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-22-student-assistant-sought-for-teaching-job/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-22-student-assistant-sought-for-teaching-job/We are currently looking for a student assistant, with a background on theoratical computer science, to support our lecture “Probabilisitic Programming”. The job description can be found here.Thu, 22 Oct 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-22-tutorial-at-fsttcs/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-22-tutorial-at-fsttcs/Joshua Moerman will give a tutorial on Automata Learning at FSTTCS 2020, the 40th conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science. It is part of the workshop Advances in Verification. The workshop will take place virtually on 18 December 2020.Thu, 22 Oct 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-05-storm-journal-paper/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-05-storm-journal-paper/The paper ” The Probabilistic Model Checker Storm” by Christian Hensel, Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Tim Quatmann and Matthias Volk has been accepted for the Journal of Software Tools in Technology Transfer. The paper presents the ins and outs of Storm, the model checker for discrete and continuous Markov models (with and without non-determinism) that has dominated the 2019 and 2020 tool competitions on probabilistic model checking.Mon, 05 Oct 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-01-3rd-place-tra-visions-2020-young-researcher-competition/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-01-3rd-place-tra-visions-2020-young-researcher-competition/Congratulations to Matthias Volk and Norman Weik who got the 3rd place in the Young Researcher Competition in the Category “Rail” for their contribution “Reliability analysis of railway station infrastructure based on dynamic fault trees” at the TRA VISIONS 2020 Conference, see https://www.travisions.eu/TRAVisions/young%5Fresearcher%5Fresults%5F2020/Thu, 01 Oct 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-01-two-popl-2021-papers/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-10-01-two-popl-2021-papers/We are delighted to announce that the following papers have been accepted for ACM Principles of Programming Languages 2021: Relatively Complete Verification of Probabilistic Programs by Kevin Batz, Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Christoph Matheja, and A Pre-Expectation Calculus for Probabilistic Sensitivity by Alejandro Aguirre, Gilles Barthe, Justin Hsu, Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Christoph Matheja. The former paper proves relative completeness for a syntex of…Thu, 01 Oct 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-08-10-student-assistant-sought-for-research-job/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-08-10-student-assistant-sought-for-research-job/We are looking for a motivated, enthusiastic student assistant to help us develop some features related to Bayesian Networks in the probabilistic model checker, Storm. The job description can be found here.Mon, 10 Aug 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-07-19-paper-at-lopstr-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-07-19-paper-at-lopstr-2020/The paper entitled “Generating Functions for Probabilistic Programs” by Lutz Klinkenberg, Kevin Batz, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Joshua Moerman and Tobias Winkler has been accepted for presentation at the 30th International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR). The paper presents a denotational semantics for probabilistic programs using generator functions, shows it relation to Kozen’s semantics and present techniques on effectively…Sun, 19 Jul 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-07-08-paper-at-concur-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-07-08-paper-at-concur-2020/The paper entitled “Residual Nominal Automata” by Joshua Moerman and Matteo Sammartino (Royal Holloway University of London) has been accepted for the 31st International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2020). Out of 112 submissions, 45 papers are accepted. The paper is about formal languages over infinite alphabets. It investigates the class of languages accepted by “residual automata”. These have good properties for learning them from observations.Wed, 08 Jul 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-06-24-paper-at-atva-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-06-24-paper-at-atva-2020/The paper entitled “Verification of indefinite-horizon POMDPs” by Alexander Bork, Sebastian Junges (UC Berkeley), Joost-Pieter Katoen and Tim Quatmann has been accepted for the 18th Int. Symp. on Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis (ATVA 2020). The key idea is to use abstractions of belief states and apply an abstraction-refinement strategy to verify unbounded reachability properties.Wed, 24 Jun 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-06-21-two-papers-at-qest-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-06-21-two-papers-at-qest-2020/The papers entitled “Bayesian Inference by Symbolic Model Checking” by Bahare Salmani and Joost-Pieter Katoen and “Probabilistic Model Checking of AODV” by Mojgan Kamali and Joost-Pieter Katen have been accepted at the 17th Int. Conf. on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems (QEST 2020). Out of 42 submissions to QEST 2020, 10 papers have been unconditionally accepted The first papers investigates the usage of symbolic probabilistic model checking of Bayes’ networks and experimentally compares this…Sun, 21 Jun 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-06-15-paper-in-jar/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-06-15-paper-in-jar/The paper entitled “Multi-Cost Bounded Trade-off Analysis in MDP” by Arnd Hartmanns, Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Tim Quatmann has been accepted for the Journal of Automated Reasoning. The paper presents a memory-efficient algorithm for multi-objective model checking problems on Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple cost structures.Mon, 15 Jun 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-06-04-paper-at-edcc-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-06-04-paper-at-edcc-2020/The paper entitled “Explaining Boolean-logic Driven Markov Processes using GSPNs” authored by Shahid Khan, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Marc Bouissou (EDF) has been accepted for the European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC 2020). The paper presents a modular semantics of BDMPs using generalised stochastic Petri nets. Transition priorities are used to resolve possible non-deterministic error propagation.Thu, 04 Jun 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-06-02-a-new-job-opportunity-as-a-student-assistant/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-06-02-a-new-job-opportunity-as-a-student-assistant/We are looking for a talented student assistant to apply formal methods in the context of wireless networks. The job description can be found here.Tue, 02 Jun 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-05-19-talk-at-nfm2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-05-19-talk-at-nfm2020/We presented our results on benchmarking software model-checkers on automotive code at the virtual NFM2020 symposium. Check out the video at https://youtu.be/XLzIXVNCIuk?t=19941 !Tue, 19 May 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-05-13-new-tacas-sc-chair/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-05-13-new-tacas-sc-chair/We are happy to inform you that Joost-Pieter Katoen has been appointed Chair of the TACAS Steering Committee. TACAS is one of the flagship conferences on formal analysis techniques and tools for computer systems. He takes over this role from Bernhard Steffen (TU Dortmund) who has been SC chair since the foundation of TACAS in 1995.Wed, 13 May 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-05-04-paper-in-science-of-computer-programming/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-05-04-paper-in-science-of-computer-programming/The paper “Synthesizing and Optimizing FDIR Recovery Strategies From Fault Trees“ by Sascha Müller, Liana Mikaelyan, Andreas Gerndt (DLR German Aerospace Center, Braunschweig) and Thomas Noll has been accepted for publication by the Science of Computer Programming Journal. It investigates the synthesis of efficient recovery strategies for Failure Detection, Isolation and Recovery (FDIR) for space systems by means of dynamic fault trees and Markov automata.Mon, 04 May 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-05-02-paper-in-safecomp-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-05-02-paper-in-safecomp-2020/The paper “A Compositional Semantics for Repairable BDMPs” by Shahid Khan, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Marc Bouissou (EDF) has been accepted for the 39th International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security. The paper describes a formal compositional semantics of Boolean-Driven Markov Processes and empirically validates the semantics using a discrete-event simulator for BDMPs.Sat, 02 May 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-04-24-paper-at-mars2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-04-24-paper-at-mars2020/The paper entitled “Various Ways to Quantify BDMPs” by Marc Bouissou, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Shahid Khan and Pavel Krcal has been accepted as invited contribution to the MARS2020 workshop. The paper compares various analysis techniques to determine the reliability of Boolean-Driven Markov Processes. It does so by analysing an emergency power supply of power plants.Fri, 24 Apr 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-04-17-paper-in-ieee-tac/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-04-17-paper-in-ieee-tac/The paper entitled “Strategy Synthesis for POMDPs in Robot Planning via Game-Based Abstractions” by Leonore Winterer, Sebastian Junges, Ralf Wimmer, Nils Jansen, Ufuk Topcu, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Bernd Becker has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Automated Control (impact factor 5). The paper shows that by applying game-based abstraction to POMDP can significantly boost the optimal strategy synthesis in POMDPs.Fri, 17 Apr 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-04-15-student-assistants-required/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-04-15-student-assistants-required/We are looking for 1-2 student assistants who would be mainly working on the correction of exercise sheets for the course of Theoretical Foundations of the UML (FUML). Applicants of the job are expected with a background in theoretical computer science (mathematical logic, formal language, automata theory, computability & complexity, etc.). Drop us an email (Chen chenms@cs.rwth-aachen.de, Salmani salmani@cs.rwth-aachen.de) if you are interested.Wed, 15 Apr 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-04-13-paper-at-lics-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-04-13-paper-at-lics-2020/The paper entitled “Approximating Values of Generalized-Reachability Stochastic Games” by Pranav Ashok, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Jan Kretinsky, Maximilian Weininger and Tobias Winkler has been accepted for presentation at LICS 2020. The main result of the paper is an algorithm to compute the Pareto curve for several objectives in two-player stochastic games.Mon, 13 Apr 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-04-06-three-papers-at-cav-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-04-06-three-papers-at-cav-2020/The following three papers from the MOVES Group have been accepted for presentation at CAV 2020: “PrIC3: Property Directed Reachability for MDPs” by Kevin Batz, Sebastian Junges, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Christoph Matheja and Philipp Schröer “Stochastic Games with Lexicographic Reachability-Safety Objectives” by Krishnendu Chatterjee, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Maximilian Weininger and Tobias Winkler, and “Unbounded-Time Safety Verification of Stochastic Differential Dynamics”…Mon, 06 Apr 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-03-09-paper-at-pods-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-03-09-paper-at-pods-2020/The paper entitled “Generative Datalog with Continuous Distributions” by Martin Grohe, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Peter Lindner has been accepted for presentation at PODS 2020, the ACM Conference on Principles of Database Systems. The paper provides a semantics to the probabilistic programming (aka: querying) language Datalog with continuous distributions.Mon, 09 Mar 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-02-21-paper-at-nfm-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-02-21-paper-at-nfm-2020/The paper “Benchmarking Software Model Checkers on Automotive Code” by Lukas Westhofen (OFFIS), Philipp Berger and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for presentation at the 12th NASA Formal Methods Symposium. The paper reports on applying 12 SVComp and one commercial software model checkers on two C programs from automotive. Bottom line: the tools from SVComp did poorly, a modified CBMC version with k-induction did reasonable and the commercial tool did the best.Fri, 21 Feb 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-02-20-principles-of-model-checking-in-chinese/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-02-20-principles-of-model-checking-in-chinese/We are pleased to announce that Tsinghua University Press is about to publish a Chinese translation of the book “Principles of Model Checking” by Christel Baier and Joost-Pieter Katoen (MIT Press, 2008).Thu, 20 Feb 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-02-12-new-job-opportunities-as-student-assistant/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-02-12-new-job-opportunities-as-student-assistant/As Prof. Katoen has become the head of the ICT Profilearea, we are looking for two new student assistants. Further information can be seen in the following document: Job Information.Wed, 12 Feb 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-02-10-paper-in-acta-informatica-2/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2020-02-10-paper-in-acta-informatica-2/The paper “Indecision and Delays are the Parents of Failure — Taming them Algorithmically by Synthesizing Delay-Resilient Control” by Mingshuai Chen (RWTH), Martin Fränzle, Yangjia Li, Peter N. Mosaad and Naijun Zhan was accepted for publication in the journal Acta Informatica.Mon, 10 Feb 2020 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-12-23-four-papers-at-tacas-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-12-23-four-papers-at-tacas-2020/Four papers have been accepted to TACAS 2020 in Dublin in which our group is involved: “Learning One-Clock Timed Automata” by Jie An, Mingshuai Chen, Bohua Zhan, Naijun Zhan, and Miaomiao Zhang, and “Interpretation-Based Violation Witness Validation for C: NITWIT” by Jan Svejda, Philipp Berger and Joost-Pieter Katoen, and “Scenario-Based Verification of Uncertain MDPs” by Murat Cubuktepe, Nils Jansen, Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Ufuk Topcu, and “Simple Strategies in…Mon, 23 Dec 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-12-12-eapls-phd-dissertation-award-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-12-12-eapls-phd-dissertation-award-2018/We are excited to announce that Christian Hensel has won the EAPLS (European Association of Programming Language and Systems) PhD Dissertation Award 2018. His dissertation on “The Probabilistic Model Checker Storm” has been selected by an international jury among all nominated dissertations. The official announcement can be found here.Thu, 12 Dec 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-10-25-compass-technology/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-10-25-compass-technology/Anzen Engineering has been granted an ESA-BIC Incubator Grant to further develop the COMPASS 3.0 tool that has been developed by the MOVES group in close cooperation with the Embedded Systems Group at FBK Trento (Italy) in the context of several ESA-funded projects. They will further develop the COMPASS technology with the aim to open it up to engineering fields such as aviation, railway and automotive).Fri, 25 Oct 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-10-24-paper-in-sttt/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-10-24-paper-in-sttt/The paper entitled “IC3 Software Model Checking” by Tim Lange, Martin R. Neuhäußer (Siemens AG), Thomas Noll, and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT). The paper introduces an extension of the IC3 verification algorithm for computer software that employs an explicit representation of a program’s control flow.Thu, 24 Oct 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-10-21-dfg-project-granted/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-10-21-dfg-project-granted/The DFG has informed us that the project proposal “Parameter Synthesis for Reliable, Performant and Efficient Wireless Network Protocols” has been granted. The project aims at developing and using parameter synthesis techniques for probabilistic timed automata and applying them to design new, optimal variants of routing protocols in wireless networks such as AODV. Mojgan Kamali will be working on this project.Mon, 21 Oct 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-10-09-paper-at-popl-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-10-09-paper-at-popl-2020/The paper entitled “Aiming Low Is Harder: Induction for Lower Bounds in Probabilistic Program Verification” by Marcel Hark, Jürgen Giesl, Benjamin Kaminski and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the 47th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2020). The paper tackles the problem of finding lower bounds of expected values / run-times of the output of probabilistic unbounded loops by establishing a tight connection between expectation transformers and stochastic…Wed, 09 Oct 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-10-08-paper-in-lncs-10000/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-10-08-paper-in-lncs-10000/The paper entitled “The 10,000 Facets of MDP Model Checking” by Christel Baier, Holger Hermanns and Joost-Pieter Katoen just (finally) appeared in LNCS volume 10,000, Computing and Software Science: State of the Art and Perspectives.Tue, 08 Oct 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-09-30-paper-at-csl-2020/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-09-30-paper-at-csl-2020/The paper entitled “Separation and Renaming in Nominal Sets” by Joshua Moerman and Jurriaan Rot (UCL, London and Radboud University, the Netherlands) has been accepted for the 28th edition in the series of Computer Science Logic (CSL 2020). Nominal sets provide a foundation for reasoning about names. They are used primarily in syntax with binders, but also, e.g., to model automata over infinite alphabets. In this paper, nominal sets are related to nominal renaming sets, which involve arbitrary…Mon, 30 Sep 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-09-29-paper-in-festschrift-scott-smolka/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-09-29-paper-in-festschrift-scott-smolka/The paper “Model Checking Revamped: On the Automated Synthesis of Markov Chains” by Milan Ceska, Christian Dehnert, Nils Jansen, Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen has been published in LNCS 11500, From Reactive Systems to Cyber-Physical Systems – Essays Dedicated to Scott A. Smolka on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday. The paper surveys a CEGAR and CEGIS approach towards the automated synthesis of finite-state Markov chains.Sun, 29 Sep 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-09-29-paper-in-information-computation/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-09-29-paper-in-information-computation/The paper entitled “Deciding probabilistic simulation between probabilistic pushdown automata and finite-state systems” by Mingzhang Huang, Hongfei Fu (both from Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted to the journal Information and Computation. The paper shows that proving probabilistic similarity between a finite probabilistic transition system (specification) and a probabilistic pushdown automaton (implementationI is EXPTIME-complete.Sun, 29 Sep 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-09-16-paper-at-prdc-2019/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-09-16-paper-at-prdc-2019/The paper “Synergizing Reliability Modeling Languages: BDMPs Without Repairs and DFTs” by Shahid Khan, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Matthias Volk, and Marc Bouissou (EDF) has been accepted at the 24th IEEE Pacific Rim Int. Symp. on Dependable Computing, Kyoto, 2019. The paper discusses rules to transform the reliability formalism BDMPs into dynamic fault trees, applies this to a nuclear power plant benchmark, and compares analysis results obtained using BDMP and DFT techniques.Mon, 16 Sep 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-08-30-best-paper-award-at-fmics-2019/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-08-30-best-paper-award-at-fmics-2019/The paper “A DFT Modeling Approach for Infrastructure Reliability Analysis of Railway Station Areas” by Matthias Volk, Norman Weik, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Nils Nießen has been awarded the best paper award at the 24th International Conference on Formal Methods for Industrial-Critical Systems (FMICS 2019), Amsterdam, The Netherlands.Fri, 30 Aug 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-06-26-paper-at-sefm-2019/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-06-26-paper-at-sefm-2019/The paper “Formal Verification of Rewriting Rules for Dynamic Fault Trees” by Yassmeen Elderhalli (Concordia Univ.), Matthias Volk, Osman Hasan (Concordia), Joost-Pieter Katoen and Sofiene Tahar (Concordia) has been accepted at the 17th International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2019). The paper models a set of existing rewrite rules for DFTs in HOL4 and provides mechanized proofs with HOL of the correctness of these rules.Wed, 26 Jun 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-06-17-paper-at-atva-2019/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-06-17-paper-at-atva-2019/The paper “Are Parametric Markov Chains Monotonic?” by Jip Spel, Sebastian Junges and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted at ATVA 2019. The paper presents a simple algorithm to check whether reachability probabilities in parametric Markov chains are monotonic in (some of) the parameters.Mon, 17 Jun 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-06-14-paper-at-concur2019/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-06-14-paper-at-concur2019/The paper “On the Complexity of Reachability in Parametric Markov Decision Processes” by Tobias Winkler, Sebastian Junges, Guillermo A. Pérez and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted at CONCUR 2019. The paper addresses the complexity of various synthesis problems for parametric Markov decision processes.Fri, 14 Jun 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-06-12-paper-in-fm2019/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-06-12-paper-in-fm2019/The paper “Counterexample-Driven Synthesis for Probabilistic Program Sketches” by Milan Ceska, Christian Dehnert, Sebastian Junges and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the FM 2019 World Congress. The paper presents a CEGIS-inspired technique to automatically synthesize probabilistic programs from sketches, i.e., programs with holes.Wed, 12 Jun 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-06-05-two-papers-in-fmics-2019/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-06-05-two-papers-in-fmics-2019/The paper “A DFT Modeling Approach for Infrastructure Reliability Analysis of Railway Station Areas” by Matthias Volk, Norman Weik, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Nils Nießen as well as the paper “Multiple Analyses, Requirements Once” by Philipp Berger, Johanna Nellen, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Erika Abraham, Md Tawhid Bin Waez and Thomas Rambow have been accepted at FMICS 2019 in Amsterdam. The second paper (joint work with Ford motor company) describes a tool-chain that can capture requirements in a…Wed, 05 Jun 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-02-01-paper-in-ress/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-02-01-paper-in-ress/The paper “Safety Analysis for Vehicle Guidance Systems with Dynamic Fault Trees” by Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Majdi Ghadhab (BMW), Matthias Volk, Matthias Kuntz (BMW) has been accepted to the journal Reliability Engineering and System Safety (impact factor 4,1). The paper shows how to model a variety of safety concepts and E/E architectures for drive automation, and that by means of efficient model-checking procedures larger-than-ever-before dynamic fault trees can be solved…Fri, 01 Feb 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-01-27-four-papers-at-tacas-2019/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2019-01-27-four-papers-at-tacas-2019/We are excited to announce that our group has four papers at TACAS 2019 in Prague. This includes (a) a tool paper on COMPASS 3.0 by Marco Bozzano (FBK), Harold Bruintjes, Alessandro Cimatti (FBK), Joost-Pieter Katoen, Thomas Noll, and Stefano Tonetta (FBK), (b) the paper “Shepherding Hordes of Markov Chains” by Milan Ceska (Brno), Nils Jansen (Nijmegen), Sebastian Junges, and Joost-Pieter Katoen, (c) the paper “Effective Entailment Checking for Separation Logic with Inductive Definitions” by…Sun, 27 Jan 2019 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-11-07-mfcs-2019-in-aachen/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-11-07-mfcs-2019-in-aachen/Together with Peter Rossmanith’s group, we host MFCS 2019 in Aachen, August 26-29, 2019. More information can be found here: https://tcs.rwth-aachen.de/mfcs2019/Wed, 07 Nov 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-10-25-paper-in-information-and-computation/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-10-25-paper-in-information-and-computation/The paper “Parametric Markov Chains: PCTL Complexity and Fraction-free Gaussian Elimination” by Christel Baier, Christian Dehnert, Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Joachim Klein and Lisa Kruse has been accepted for the journal Information and Computation. The paper presents (a) an algorithm to compute reachability probabilities and expected accumulated rewards of PCTL formulas over parametric Markov chains using the fraction-free Gaussian elimination approach, and (b) presents various…Thu, 25 Oct 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-10-25-paper-in-journal-of-aerospace-information-systems/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-10-25-paper-in-journal-of-aerospace-information-systems/The paper entitled “Synthesizing FDIR Recovery Strategies From Non-Deterministic Dynamic Fault Trees” by Sascha Müller, Andreas Gerndt (both from the German Aerospace Center (DLR)), and Thomas Noll has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Aerospace Information Systems. It shows how appropriate recovery strategies for dealing with failures in aerospace control systems can be synthesized from a non-deterministic variant of Dynamic Fault Trees.Thu, 25 Oct 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-10-22-paper-at-iwil-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-10-22-paper-at-iwil-2018/The paper entitled “Harrsh: A Tool for Unified Reasoning about Symbolic-Heap Separation Logic” by Jens Katelaan, Christoph Matheja, Thomas Noll and Florian Zuleger has been accepted for presentation at the 13th International Workshop on the Implementation of Logics (IWIL 2018). The paper presents a tool for unified reasoning about the symbolic-heap fragment of separation logic. It supports the analysis of robustness properties with user-defined inductive predicates.Mon, 22 Oct 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-10-09-paper-at-popl-2019/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-10-09-paper-at-popl-2019/The paper entitled “Quantitative Separation Logic – A Logic for Reasoning about Probabilistic Pointer Programs” by Kevin Batz, Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Christoph Matheja and Thomas Noll has been accepted for presentation at the 46th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2019). The paper presents a logic for reasoning about probabilistic programs with heaps, which conservatively extends Reynold’s/O’Hearn’s separation logic and the pre-expectation…Tue, 09 Oct 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-10-06-paper-at-ftscs-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-10-06-paper-at-ftscs-2018/The paper entitled “Synthesizing and Optimizing FDIR Recovery Strategies From Fault Trees” by Liana Mikaelyan, Sascha Müller, Andreas Gerndt and Thomas Noll has been accepted at the 6th International Workshop on Formal Techniques for Safety-Critical Systems (FTSCS 2018) at Gold Coast, Australia. The key idea of the paper is to synthesize failure recovery strategies for satellites from Dynamic Fault Trees, and to optimize them by means of automata-theoretic methods.Sat, 06 Oct 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-10-05-best-paper-award-at-sum-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-10-05-best-paper-award-at-sum-2018/The paper entitled “Rule-based Conditioning of Probabilistic Data” by Maurice van Keulen, Benjamin Kaminski, Christoph Matheja and Joost-Pieter Katoen has received the best paper award (out of 37 submissions) at the 12th Int. Conf. on Scalable Uncertainty Management (SUM 2018) in Milano, Italy.Fri, 05 Oct 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-07-12-katoen-member-dagstuhl-scientific-advisory-board/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-07-12-katoen-member-dagstuhl-scientific-advisory-board/The Supervisory Board of Schloss Dagstuhl has apppointed Joost-Pieter Katoien as member of the Dagstuhl Scientific Advisory Board. His four-year term starts on January 1, 2019.Thu, 12 Jul 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-06-28-paper-at-atva-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-06-28-paper-at-atva-2018/The paper entitled “Synthesis in pMDPs: A Tale of 1001 Parameters” by Murat Cubuktepe, Nils Jansen, Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Ufuk Topcu has been accepted for ATVA 2018 in Los Angeles. The key idea of the paper is to use advanced techniques from convex optimisation in tight combination with model checking for synthesizing parameters in parametric Markov models.Thu, 28 Jun 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-06-27-two-papers-at-qest-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-06-27-two-papers-at-qest-2018/The paper “Parameter-Independent Strategies for pMDPs via POMDPs” by Sebastian Arming, Ezio Bartocci, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Ana Sokolova, and Joost-Pieter Katoen and the paper Model Checking For Safe Navigation Among Humans**“** by Sebastian Junges, Nils Jansen, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Ufuk Topcu, Ruohan Zhang and Mary Hayhoe have been accepted at QEST 2018 in Beijing. The first paper shows that strategies for parametric MDPs which optimize the expected reachability probability under a given…Wed, 27 Jun 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-06-14-paper-at-sum-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-06-14-paper-at-sum-2018/The paper entitled “Rule-based Conditioning of Probabilistic Data Integration” by Maurice van Keulen, Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Christoph Matheja has been accepted for the 12th Int. Conf. on Scalable Uncertainty Management. The paper presents how to integrate evidences into a probabilistic database.Thu, 14 Jun 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-05-18-positions-for-phd-and-postdocs/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-05-18-positions-for-phd-and-postdocs/We solicit applications for PhD studentships and postdoctoral research positions in the area of verifying probabilistic programs. The positions are funded by the recently acquired ERC Advanced Grant "Formal Reasoning about Probabilistic Programs (FRAPPANT)". What is this project all about? Probabilistic programs describe recipes on how to infer statistical conclusions about data from a complex mixture of uncertain data and real-world observations. They can represent probabilistic graphical…Fri, 18 May 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-05-15-paper-at-uai-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-05-15-paper-at-uai-2018/The paper entitled “Finite-State Controllers of POMDPs using Parameter Synthesis” by Sebastian Junges, Nils Jansen, Ralf Wimmer, Tim Quatmann, Leonore Winterer, Bernd Becker, and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the Uncertainty in AI 2018 Conference in Monterrey, USA. The key idea of the paper is that that computing randomised FSCs on POMDPs is equivalent to (and computationally as hard as) synthesis for parametric Markov chains.Tue, 15 May 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-29-paper-at-spin-2018-symposium/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-29-paper-at-spin-2018-symposium/The paper entitled “Improving Generalization in Software IC3” by Tim Lange, Frederick Prinz, Martin R. Neuhäußer (Siemens), Thomas Noll and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the 25th International Symposium on Model Checking of Software (SPIN 2018) in Malaga, Spain. The paper presents several advancements to the generalization procedure of IC3, focused on software verification. Experimental results show the effect of the various techniques.Sun, 29 Apr 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-20-paper-in-acta-informatica/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-20-paper-in-acta-informatica/The paper entitled “On the Hardness of Analyzing Probabilistic Programs” by Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Christoph Matheja has been accepted for publication in the journal Acta Informatica. The papers presents various hardness results for elementary decision problems on probabilistic programs such as “does a program terminate almost surely?”, “does it terminate in finite expected time?”, and “is the co-variance of two variables equal to a constant?”.Fri, 20 Apr 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-13-paper-in-journal-of-the-acm/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-13-paper-in-journal-of-the-acm/The paper entitled “Weakest Precondition Reasoning for Expected Runtimes of Randomized Algorithms” by Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Christoph Matheja and Federico Olmedo has been accepted for the prestigious journal Journal of the ACM. This paper presents a wp–style calculus for obtaining bounds on the expected run time of randomized algorithms.Its application includes determining the (possibly infinite) expected termination time of a randomized algorithm and proving positive…Fri, 13 Apr 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-09-paper-accepted-at-sefm-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-09-paper-accepted-at-sefm-2018/The paper “Graph-Based Shape Analysis Beyond Context-Freeness” by Hannah Arndt, Christina Jansen, Christoph Matheja and Thomas Noll has been accepted for publication at the 16th International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2018). It introduces a shape analysis for reasoning about relational properties of data structures that are maintained by a pointer program, such as balancedness of trees or lengths of lists.Mon, 09 Apr 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-09-two-papers-at-fm-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-09-two-papers-at-fm-2018/The papers “Verifying Auto-Generated C Code from Simulink” by Philipp Berger, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Erika Ábrahám, Md Tawhid Bin Waez and Thomas Rambow, as well as the paper “Formal Verification of Automotive Simulink Controller Models: Empirical Technical Challenges, Evaluation and Recommendations” by Johanna Nellen, Thomas Rambow, Md Tawhid Bin Waez, Erika Abraham and Joost-Pieter Katoen, have been accepted for the Formal Methods 2018 symposium. Both papers report on results obtained in joint…Mon, 09 Apr 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-06-professor-katoen-receives-erc-advanced-grant/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-06-professor-katoen-receives-erc-advanced-grant/Joost-Pieter Katoen is awarded the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. It will allow to fund a project on formal reasoning techniques for probabilistic programs over a period of five years. ERC Advanced Grants are intended to support the very best research to be conducted in EU member states and associated countries. They are to allow exceptional, established leaders in research to pursue ground-breaking high-risk projects that open new directions in their…Fri, 06 Apr 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-01-four-papers-at-cav-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-04-01-four-papers-at-cav-2018/Four papers with involvement of the MOVES group have been accepted at CAV 2018: “Sound Value Iteration” by Tim Quatmann and Joost-Pieter Katoen “Let this Graph be your Witness! An Attestor for Verifying Java Pointer Programs” by Hannah Arndt, Christina Jansen, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Christoph Matheja and Thomas Noll “Monitoring CTMCs By Multi-Clock Timed Automata” by Yijun Feng, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Haokun Li, Bican Xia and Naijun Zhan, and “Symbolic Liveness Analysis of Real-World Software” by…Sun, 01 Apr 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-03-04-paper-accepted-at-dsn-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-03-04-paper-accepted-at-dsn-2018/The paper “Branching Bisimulation and Concurrent Object Verification” by Xiaoxiao Yang, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Huimin Lin, Gaoang Liu, and Hao Wu has been accepted for the 48th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2018) in Luxemburg. The paper, a result of the cooperation within the CDZ project CAP with the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, proposes the usage of branching bisimulation for proving elementary properties of…Sun, 04 Mar 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-03-01-paper-accepted-at-petri-nets-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2018-03-01-paper-accepted-at-petri-nets-2018/The paper “One Nets Fits All — A unifying semantics of Dynamic Fault Trees using GSPNs” by Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Marielle Stoelinga and Matthias Volk has been accepted for Petri Nets 2018. The paper presents a simple, compositional GSPN semantics for DFTs that unifies all existing DFT semantics from the literature.Thu, 01 Mar 2018 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-12-22-paper-accepted-at-tacas-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-12-22-paper-accepted-at-tacas-2018/The paper “Multi-Cost Bounded Reachability in MDPs” by Arnd Hartmanns, Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Tim Quatmann has been accepted for TACAS 2018. The paper presents an efficient algorithm for multi-objective model checking problems on Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple cost structures.Fri, 22 Dec 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-12-21-paper-accepted-at-esop-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-12-21-paper-accepted-at-esop-2018/The paper “How long, O Bayesian network, will I sample thee?” by Kevin Batz, Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Christoph Matheja has been accepted at the European Symposium on Programming (ESOP 18). The paper shows how to use deductive program verification to deduce the expected time to obtain a single i.i.d-sample from a Bayesian network when using rejection sampling. The approach has been automated and shows that determining expected sampling times of the order of millions years for…Thu, 21 Dec 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-11-09-kickoff-meeting-rtg-unravel/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-11-09-kickoff-meeting-rtg-unravel/On November 10 the official kick-off meeting of the Research Training Group UnRAVeL (Uncertainty and Randomness in Algorithms, Verification and Logic) will take place in room 9222, E3 Building. The program includes invited talks by the renowned researchers Prof. Marta Kwiatkowska (University of Oxford) and Prof. Rolf Möhring (TU Berlin), two-minutes talks by the UnRAVeL doctorate students, and piano as well as saxophone music.Thu, 09 Nov 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-11-07-christina-jansen-defended-her-phd-dissertation/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-11-07-christina-jansen-defended-her-phd-dissertation/Thursday October 19, Christina Jansen successfully defended her PhD dissertation, entitled “Static Analysis of Pointer Programs: Linking Graph Grammars and Separation Logic” for a jury consisting of Marieke Huisman (University of Twente, NL), Gerhard Woeginger, Horst Lichter, Thomas Noll, and Joost-Pieter Katoen (all Aachen). Christina’s dissertation is concerned with establishing a connection between data structure grammars and separation logic, and extending the hyperedge-replacement grammar…Tue, 07 Nov 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-11-07-young-researcher-award-for-sebastian-junges/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-11-07-young-researcher-award-for-sebastian-junges/Sebastian Junges today received the Young Research Award, a prize for excellent young researchers (students and Ph.D. students) in the ICT field, awarded by the ICT Profile Area of RWTH Aachen University. The prize comes with a financial support for Sebastian’s career.Tue, 07 Nov 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-09-27-dfg-grant-for-attestor-project/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-09-27-dfg-grant-for-attestor-project/The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved to extend the funding period of the ATTESTOR project for another two-year period. The aim of the follow-up project is to develop novel techniques and tools to support formal reasoning on relational shape properties of (concurrent) pointer programs, allowing e.g. to reason about balanced tree data structures. The overarching goal is to signicantly improve the expressivity, automation, and efficiency of symbolic analysis and verication of such…Wed, 27 Sep 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-09-26-paper-accepted-at-popl-2018/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-09-26-paper-accepted-at-popl-2018/The paper entitled “A new proof rule for almost-sure termination” by Annabelle McIver, Carroll Morgan, Benjamin Kaminski, and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for POPL 2018. The paper presents a proof rule to verify whether a probabilistic program (possibly including non-determinacy) almost surely terminates. The new proof rule enables to capture a larger class of programs than could be captured so far with existing techniques.Tue, 26 Sep 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-09-14-nii-shonan-seminar/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-09-14-nii-shonan-seminar/The MOVES group is co-organising a seminar on Analysis and Verification of Pointer Programs, which will be held from October 2 to 5, 2017, as an NII Shonan Meeting at Shonan Village Center in Japan. This meeting will be a scientific event bringing together both theoreticians and practitioners working on different techniques for heap abstraction and pointer program analysis. It aims to provide a broad understanding of the various techniques to support the exploitation of their commonalities such…Thu, 14 Sep 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-09-07-paper-accepted-at-srds-2017-2/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-09-07-paper-accepted-at-srds-2017-2/The paper entitled “Automated Fine Tuning of Probabilistic Self-Stabilizing Algorithms” by Saba Aflaki, Matthias Volk, Borzoo Bonakdarpour, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Arne Storjohann has been selected as Prof. C.V. Ramamoorthy Best Paper Award at the 36th IEEE Int. Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems in Hongkong. The paper presents automated techniques to find the probability distribution that achieves minimum average recovery time for randomized distributed self-stabilizing algorithms.Thu, 07 Sep 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-09-07-paper-accepted-in-acm-toplas/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-09-07-paper-accepted-in-acm-toplas/The paper “Conditioning in Probabilistic Programming” by Federico Olmedo, Friedrich Gretz, Nils Jansen, Benjamin L. Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Annabelle McIver has been accepted for the journal ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. The paper treats the semantic intricacies of introducing conditioning in a probabilistic programming language, its interference with non-determinacy, and divergence.Thu, 07 Sep 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-09-02-symposium-modeled-tested-trusted/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-09-02-symposium-modeled-tested-trusted/In honour of the 60th birthday of Ed Brinksma, we co-organize the symposium “ModelEd, TestEd, TrustEd” on 18 October 2017, in the Amphitheatre (Vrijhof), University of Twente, the Netherlands. The symposium will be a scientific event hosting a number of renowned speakers with whom Ed Brinksma has cooperated in the past. The day will culminate in the presentation of a FestSchrift to the guest of honour. For the programme, further information and registration, please see…Sat, 02 Sep 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-07-13-paper-accepted-at-cdc-2017/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-07-13-paper-accepted-at-cdc-2017/The paper entitled “Motion Planning under Partial Observability using Game-Based Abstraction” by Leonore Winterer, Sebastian Junges, Ralf Wimmer, Nils Jansen, Ufuk Topcu, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Bernd Becker has been accepted for publication at CDC 2017 in Melbourne, Australia. The paper applies model-checking to synthesise motion plans for robots under partial observability, and makes this feasible by utilising game-based abstraction techniques.Thu, 13 Jul 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-06-26-paper-accepted-at-safecomp-2017/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-06-26-paper-accepted-at-safecomp-2017/The paper entitled “Model-Based Safety Analysis of Vehicle Guidance Systems” by Majdi Ghadhab, Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Matthias Kuntz and Matthias Volk, has been accepted at SafeComp 2017. The paper emerged from a co-operation with BMW and presents a model-based approach towards the safety analysis of vehicle guidance systems by comparing different mappings from functional blocks onto different hardware platforms.Mon, 26 Jun 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-06-26-paper-accepted-at-srds-2017/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-06-26-paper-accepted-at-srds-2017/The paper entitled “Automated Fine Tuning of Probabilistic Self-Stabilizing Algorithms” by Saba Aflaki, Matthias Volk, Borzoo Bonakdarpour, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Arne Storjohann has been accepted at SRDS 2017 in Hongkong. The paper presents automated techniques to find the probability distribution that achieves minimum average recovery time for randomized distributed self-stabilizing algorithms.Mon, 26 Jun 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-06-14-12-vacant-ph-d-positions/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-06-14-12-vacant-ph-d-positions/We are looking for enthusiastic and highly qualified doctoral researchers. 12 positions are available within the Research Training Group (RTG) UnRAVeL. The key emphasis of an RTG is on the qualification of doctoral researchers with a focused research program and a structured training strategy. UnRAVeL aims to significantly advance probabilistic modelling and analysis for uncertainty by developing new theories, algorithms, and tool-supported verification techniques, and to apply them to core…Wed, 14 Jun 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-05-24-prof-joost-pieter-katoen-receives-the-famos-fur-familie-price-by-rwth-university/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-05-24-prof-joost-pieter-katoen-receives-the-famos-fur-familie-price-by-rwth-university/The MOVES group proudly announces that Professor Joost-Pieter Katoen has received the “FAMOS für Familie” price by RWTH Aachen University. Based on nominations by employees, it is yearly awarded to management personnel at our university. Its aim is to acknowledge particular effort for family-friendly working conditions, sustainable team leadership, and creative solutions to staff management. The seven winners of the present year were selected by a jury made up of representatives from the…Wed, 24 May 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-05-17-paper-accepted-in-ieee-trans-on-industrial-informatics/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-05-17-paper-accepted-in-ieee-trans-on-industrial-informatics/The paper “Fast Dynamic Fault Tree Analysis by Model Checking Techniques” by Matthias Volk, Sebastian Junges, and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. The paper presents a novel state-space generation technique for DFTs and combines this with a simple, though very effective, abstraction.Wed, 17 May 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-05-15-5-million-euros-for-rtg-unravel/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-05-15-5-million-euros-for-rtg-unravel/The German Research Council (DFG) has granted our proposal to launch a Research Training Group on “Uncertainty and Randomness in Algorithms, Verification and Logic” (UnRAVeL). It funds 15 Ph.D. positions over a period of 4,5 years to work on challenging foundational research questions to treat uncertainty. The project involves 12 research groups from theoretical computer science, robotics, IT security, mathematics, railway engineering and business administration. The official press release can…Mon, 15 May 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-04-21-two-papers-accepted-at-cav-2017/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-04-21-two-papers-accepted-at-cav-2017/The papers “A Storm is Coming: A Modern Probabilistic Model Checker” by Christian Dehnert, Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Matthias Volk and “Markov Automata with Multiple Objectives” by Tim Quatmann, Sebastian Junges and Joost-Pieter Katoen have been accepted at CAV 2017. The first paper presents the new and powerful probabilistic model checker storm, whereas the second paper presents algorithms and experiments on verifying Markov automata subject to various objectives.Fri, 21 Apr 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-04-10-honorary-doctorate-for-joost-pieter-katoen/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-04-10-honorary-doctorate-for-joost-pieter-katoen/The MOVES group proudly announces that Professor Joost-Pieter Katoen has received a Honorary Doctorate from Aalborg University, Denmark. He was awarded for his distinguished efforts in the field of Computer Science, in particular Computer-Aided Verification. An introductory video can be found here.Mon, 10 Apr 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-03-22-lics17-paper-accepted/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-03-22-lics17-paper-accepted/The paper “A Weakest Pre-Expectation Semantics for Mixed-Sign Expectations” by Benjamin L. Kaminski and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted to LICS 2017. The paper presents a wp–style calculus for reasoning about the expected values of mixed–sign unbounded random variables after execution of a probabilistic program.Wed, 22 Mar 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-01-29-probabilistic-model-checker-storm-first-release/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-01-29-probabilistic-model-checker-storm-first-release/We launch the new probabilistic model checker Storm. It features the analysis of discrete- and continuous-time variants of both Markov chains and MDPs. It supports the Prism and JANI modeling languages, probabilistic programs, dynamic fault trees and generalized stochastic Petri nets. It has a modular set-up in which solvers and symbolic engines can easily be exchanged. It offers a Python API for rapid prototyping by encapsulating Storm’s fast and scalable algorithms. Experiments on a variety…Sun, 29 Jan 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-01-09-workshop-on-learning-in-verification-live/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-01-09-workshop-on-learning-in-verification-live/At ETAPS 2017, a workshop on Learning in Verification takes place. The aim of the workshop is to stimulate discussion on the potential of learning techniques in verification and to report on recent advancements,. The program will consist of presentations of work recently accepted to top conferences and ongoing work. The submissions will thus be abstracts of such work, limited to at most two pages, and will only be published in the informal pre-proceedings for the convenience of the…Mon, 09 Jan 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-01-04-first-school-on-foundations-of-programming-and-software-systems-probabilistic-programming/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2017-01-04-first-school-on-foundations-of-programming-and-software-systems-probabilistic-programming/It is our greatest pleasure to announce the first edition of the School on Foundations of Programming and Software systems (FoPPS). The school is jointly funded by EATCS, ETAPS, ACM SIGLOG, and ACM SIGPLAN. The topic of the first edition is Probabilistic Programming. It will take place in Braga, Portugal, May 29th – June 4th 2017. Registration: March 31, 2017 (early) and May 20, 2017 (late). Probabilistic programming languages are used for modelling and analysis purposes across multiple areas…Wed, 04 Jan 2017 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-12-22-two-papers-accepted-at-tacas-2017/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-12-22-two-papers-accepted-at-tacas-2017/The paper “Sequential Convex Programming for the Efficient Verification of Parametric MDPs” by Murat Cubuktepe, Nils Jansen, Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Ivan Papusha, Hasan A. Poonawala, and Ufuk Topcu, and the paper “JANI: Quantitative Model and Tool Interaction” by Carlos E. Budde, Christian Dehnert, Ernst Moritz Hahn, Arnd Hartmanns, Sebastian Junges, and Andrea Turrini have been accepted at TACAS 2017. JANI consists of an intermediate model language and tool interaction protocol…Thu, 22 Dec 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-12-17-paper-accepted-at-esop-2017/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-12-17-paper-accepted-at-esop-2017/The paper “Unified Reasoning about Robustness Properties of Symbolic-Heap Separation Logic” by Christina Jansen, Jens Katelaan, Christoph Matheja, Thomas Noll and Florian Zuleger has been accepted at ESOP 2017 in Uppsala, Sweden. It introduces the concept of heap automata, a novel formalism for automatic reasoning about robustness properties of the symbolic-heap fragment of separation logic with user-defined inductive predicates.Sat, 17 Dec 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-11-22-paper-accepted-in-formal-aspects-of-computing/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-11-22-paper-accepted-in-formal-aspects-of-computing/The paper “Fault Trees on a Diet: Automated Reduction by Graph Rewriting” by Sebastian Junges, Dennis Guck, Arend Rensink, Marielle Stoelinga and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted in the journal Formal Aspects of Computing. The more than 50-page paper shows how graph rewriting can be applied to reduce dynamic fault trees prior to their analysis. Experiments show a speed up and memory gain of about two orders of magnitude.Tue, 22 Nov 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-11-18-talk-on-semantics-for-mixed-sign-expectations-accepted-at-popl-pps-workshop/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-11-18-talk-on-semantics-for-mixed-sign-expectations-accepted-at-popl-pps-workshop/The talk on “A Weakest Pre-Expectation Semantics for Mixed-Sign Expectations” has been accepted for presentation at the Probabilistic Programming Semantics (PPS) workshop at POPL’17.Fri, 18 Nov 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-08-30-paper-accepted-at-information-computation/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-08-30-paper-accepted-at-information-computation/The paper “Quantitative Model Checking of Discrete-Time Markov Processes” by Ilya Tkachev, Alexandru Mereacre, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Alessandro Abate has been accepted for publication in Information and Computation. The almost 50-page paper focuses on optimizing (repeated) reachability probabilities of events of interest defined over general controlled discrete-time Markov processes. Unlike known results over finite-state models, this work considers general models evolving over uncountable…Tue, 30 Aug 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-08-06-cav-award-2016/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-08-06-cav-award-2016/Dino Distefano (FaceBook and Queen Mary University) received the CAV Award 2016, together with his co-workers, for their work on Separation Logic and demonstrating its applicability on the automated verification of dynamic data structures. Dino is the first Ph.D. student of Joost-Pieter Katoen, who supervised him together with Arend Rensink (Twente).Sat, 06 Aug 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-08-06-paper-accepted-at-setta16/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-08-06-paper-accepted-at-setta16/The paper “Performance Evaluation on Modern Concurrent Data Structures” by Hao Wu, Xiaoxiao Yang and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted at SETTA 2016 in Beijing. The paper considers the modelling of several concurrent data structures in LOTOS-NT and evaluates their performance by model-based analysis.Sat, 06 Aug 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-07-15-aadl-standards-meeting/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-07-15-aadl-standards-meeting/From July 25 to 28, our group hosts the Summer meeting of the AADL Standardization Committee. The Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) is a modeling language for the specification, analysis, automated integration and code generation of safety-critical systems. Amongst others, it is being used in our COMPASS project for designing on-board computer-based aerospace systems.Fri, 15 Jul 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-06-21-paper-accepted-at-srds/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-06-21-paper-accepted-at-srds/The paper “Model-Checking Assisted Protocol Design for Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Wireless Networks” by Christian Dombrowski, Sebastian Junges, Joost-Pieter Katoen and James Gross has been accepted at SRDS 2016 in Budapest, Hungary. It presents the modelling and verification of EchoRing, a protocol for the MAC-layer tailored towards ultra-reliable wireless communication. The verification process uncovered some inconsistencies in the protocol, and the results have been compared to a physical…Tue, 21 Jun 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-06-21-two-papers-accepted-at-atva/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-06-21-two-papers-accepted-at-atva/Two new papers have been accepted at ATVA 2016 in Chiba, Japan. The paper “Bounded Model Checking for Probabilistic Program” by Nils Jansen, Christian Dehnert, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Lukas Westhofen describes an automated on-the-fly verification approach for probabilistic programs. It incorporates key features such as conditioning and parametric probabilities. Experiments show the feasibility and scalability on a wide range of benchmarks. The paper “Parameter…Tue, 21 Jun 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-05-20-lics-2016-invited-talk/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-05-20-lics-2016-invited-talk/Joost-Pieter Katoen will give an invited talk on “The Probabilistic Model Checking Landscape” at LICS 2016 in New York City, early July 2016. The accompanying paper can be found here.Fri, 20 May 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-05-15-paper-accepted-at-qest-2016/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-05-15-paper-accepted-at-qest-2016/The paper “Inferring Covariances for Probabilistic Programs” by Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Christoph Matheja has been accepted at the Int. Conf. on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems (QEST) in Quebec City, Canada. The paper shows that approximating (co)variances is computationally more difficult than approximating expected values and presents invariant-based techniques for approximating both upper and lower bounds.Sun, 15 May 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-05-05-paper-accepted-at-safecomp-2016/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-05-05-paper-accepted-at-safecomp-2016/Two new papers have been accepted at SAFECOMP 2016 in Trondheim, Norway. The paper “Advancing Dynamic Fault Tree Analysis” by Matthias Volk, Sebastian Junges, and Joost-Pieter Katoen presents a mixture of a new state-space generation technique together with several reduction techniques for dynamic fault trees. Experiments results show improvements of up to five orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art techniques. The paper “Catalogue of System and Software Properties” by Victor Bos,…Thu, 05 May 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-04-11-paper-accepted-in-acm-todaes/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-04-11-paper-accepted-in-acm-todaes/The paper “Probabilistic Model Checking for Uncertain Scenario-Aware Data Flow” by Joost-Pieter Katoen and Hao Wu has been accepted for publication in the journal ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems. A short version thereof received the best paper award at the IDEA Workshop during the CPS week 2016. Based on a compositional semantics of exponentially-timed S(A)DF it proposes to use efficient probabilistic model-checking techniques to analyse quantitative objectives of data-flow…Mon, 11 Apr 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-04-07-best-theory-paper-at-etaps-2016/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-04-07-best-theory-paper-at-etaps-2016/The paper “Weakest Precondition Reasoning for Expected Run-Times of Probabilistic Programs” by Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Christoph Matheja, and Federico Olmedo, has received the EATCS Best Paper Award at ETAPS 2016. Out of 473 submissions, this paper was selected as one of the two best theory papers at ETAPS 2016.Thu, 07 Apr 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-04-05-two-papers-accepted-at-lics-2016/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-04-05-two-papers-accepted-at-lics-2016/The paper “Reasoning about Recursive Probabilistic Programs” by Federico Olmedo, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Christoph Matheja, as well as the paper “On the Satisfiability of Some Simple Probabilistic Logics” by Souymodip Chakraborty and Joost-Pieter Katoen have been accepted at LICS 2016. The former paper presents a wp-calculus and accompanying proof rules for recursive probabilistic programs and applies this to analyse the correctness and run-time of randomised binary…Tue, 05 Apr 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-02-29-paper-accepted-at-dsn-2016/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-02-29-paper-accepted-at-dsn-2016/The paper “Uncovering Dynamic Fault Trees” by Sebastian Junges, Dennis Guck, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Marielle Stoelinga has been accepted for publication at DSN 2016. The paper presents a thorough discussion of the semantic intricacies of dynamic fault trees and a comparison of existing interpretations of such fault trees.Mon, 29 Feb 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-01-12-paper-accepted-by-theoretical-computer-science/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2016-01-12-paper-accepted-by-theoretical-computer-science/The paper “Confluence Reduction for Markov Automata” by Mark Timmer, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Jaco van de Pol and Marielle Stoelinga has been accepted for the journal Theoretical Computer Science. The paper describes an on-the-fly symbolic reduction technique for Markov automata akin to partial-order reduction. Experiments show that up to 90% of the potential reductions that could be obtained using divergence-sensitive stutter bisimulation can be attained.Tue, 12 Jan 2016 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-12-18-paper-accepted-at-esop-2016/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-12-18-paper-accepted-at-esop-2016/The paper “Weakest Precondition Reasoning for Expected Run-Times of Probabilistic Programs” by Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Christoph Matheja and Federico Olmedo has been accepted for publication at ESOP 2016. The paper presents a wp-calculus for probabilistic programs to analyse their expected run-times, together with a set of proof rules for loops, and shows its application to several examples, including the coupon collector problem.Fri, 18 Dec 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-12-18-paper-accepted-at-tacas-2016/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-12-18-paper-accepted-at-tacas-2016/The paper “Safety-constrained Reinforcement Learning for MDPs” by Sebastian Junges, Nils Jansen, Christian Dehnert, Ufuk Topcu and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted at TACAS 2016 (acceptance rate 25,7%). The paper addresses the problem: Given an MDP with a cost structure, synthesize an optimal policy subject to safety constraints. In particular, the costs of actions are not known before they are executed.Fri, 18 Dec 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-12-10-mysuru-2016-workshop-on-quantitative-verification/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-12-10-mysuru-2016-workshop-on-quantitative-verification/We co-organise the Mysuru 2016 Workshop “Trends and Challenges in Quantitative Verification”, together with Igor Walukiewicz, Srivathsan, and Akshay, early February. Further details can be found here.Thu, 10 Dec 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-12-08-paper-in-top-100-most-cited-papers-in-software-engineering/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-12-08-paper-in-top-100-most-cited-papers-in-software-engineering/The 2003 IEEE TSE paper “Model-Checking Algorithms for Continuous-Time Markov Chains” by Christel Baier, Boudewijn Haverkort, Holger Hermanns, and Joost-Pieter Katoen is ranked 74 in the top-100 of most cited papers in software engineering (and ranked 57 in the top-100 when considering number of citations per year). The top-100 has recently been published in Information & Software Technology (see paper) and is based on surveying 70,000 papers.Tue, 08 Dec 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-11-08-paper-accepted-by-formal-methods-in-system-design/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-11-08-paper-accepted-by-formal-methods-in-system-design/The paper entitled “Efficient GPU Algorithms for Parallel Decomposition of Graphs into Strongly Connected and Maximal End Components” by Anton Wijs, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Dragan Boshnacki, has been accepted to the special issue of the journal FMSD devoted to CAV 2014.Sun, 08 Nov 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-11-08-talk-on-conditioning-accepted-at-popl-pps-workshop/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-11-08-talk-on-conditioning-accepted-at-popl-pps-workshop/The talk on “On the Semantic Intricacies of Conditioning” has been accepted for presentation at the Probabilistic Programming Semantics (PPS) workshop at POPL’16.Sun, 08 Nov 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-09-26-friedrich-gretz-successfully-defended-his-ph-d-dissertation/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-09-26-friedrich-gretz-successfully-defended-his-ph-d-dissertation/Friday September 26, Friedrich Gretz successfully defended his PhD dissertation, entitled “Semantics and Loop Invariant Synthesis for Probabilistic Programs” for a jury consisting of Sriram Sankaranarayanan (Boulder, USA), Stefan Kowalewski, Jürgen Giesl, and Joost-Pieter Katoen (all Aachen). Friedrich’s dissertation studies weakest pre-condition semantics, relates this to operational semantics, and extends this to including observations. In addition, he developed the Prinsys tool for…Sat, 26 Sep 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-09-22-phd-thesis-on-probabilistic-counterexamples/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-09-22-phd-thesis-on-probabilistic-counterexamples/The PhD thesis of Nils Jansen titled “Counterexamples in Probabilistic Verification” has recently been published online at the library webpage and can also be found here. The thesis covers multiple approaches and new concepts to the generation and representation of counterexamples for refuted properties on probabilistic systems. All results have been published at several conference proceedings and journals.Tue, 22 Sep 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-09-10-sebastian-junges-awarded-with-best-master-thesis-prize/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-09-10-sebastian-junges-awarded-with-best-master-thesis-prize/Sebastian Junges will receive the price for the best Master Thesis in Computer Science 2014/15 in Germany. His work, entitled Simplifying Fault Trees by Graph Rewriting, has been selected by the Fakultätentag Informatik. Sebastian will be awarded the price during the 45th Annual Meeting of the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. – GI).Thu, 10 Sep 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-08-28-5456/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-08-28-5456/The paper entitled Juggrnaut: Using Graph Grammars for Abstracting Unbounded Heap Structures by Jonathan Heinen, Christina Jansen, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Thomas Noll has been accepted for publication by the Formal Methods in System Design journal. This paper presents a novel abstraction framework for heap data structures that employs graph grammars for modelling dynamic data structures, and for defining abstraction mappings to handle infinite state spaces that can arise during the execution of…Fri, 28 Aug 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-08-23-paper-accepted-at-setta/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-08-23-paper-accepted-at-setta/The paper “Fault trees on a Diet” by Sebastian Junges, Dennis Guck, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Arend Rensink and Mariëlle Stoelinga has been accepted at SETTA’15. The paper presents a novel, fully automated reduction technique for Dynamic Fault Trees (DFTs). The key idea is to interpret DFTs as directed graphs and exploit graph rewriting to simplify them.Sun, 23 Aug 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-08-18-paper-accepted-at-aplas-2015/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-08-18-paper-accepted-at-aplas-2015/The paper entitled Tree-Like Grammars and Separation Logic by Christoph Matheja, Christina Jansen and Thomas Noll has been accepted at the 13th Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2015). This paper investigates the relationship between certain classes of tree grammars and logical formalisms, especially with regard to the corresponding inclusion and entailment problems.Tue, 18 Aug 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-07-23-cav-2015/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-07-23-cav-2015/Our new PROPhESY tool for parameter synthesis of Markov chains has been elected (out of 30 artefacts) as runner-up in the Artifact Evaluation at CAV 2015. In addition, Joost-Pieter Katoen gave a three-hour tutorial on probabilistic verification. The tutorial slides can be found here.Thu, 23 Jul 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-07-08-paper-accepted-at-fmcad-2015/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-07-08-paper-accepted-at-fmcad-2015/The paper entitled IC3 Software Model Checking on Control Flow Automata by Tim Lange, Martin Neuhäußer (Siemens AG) and Thomas Noll has been accepted at the 15th International Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD 2015). This paper presents a method to exploit a program’s control flow for efficiently model checking its correctness properties.Wed, 08 Jul 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-06-28-sebastian-junges-receives-prize-for-excellent-master-studies/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-06-28-sebastian-junges-receives-prize-for-excellent-master-studies/Sebastian Junges received on last Friday (June 26) a price for his excellent achievements in his master studies Computer Science. Sebastian recently completed his master thesis on “Simplifying Dynamic Fault Trees by Graph Rewriting” and was co-supervised by Marielle Stoelinga (Twente). We congratulate Sebastian with this great result!Sun, 28 Jun 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-06-19-paper-accepted-at-formats-2015/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-06-19-paper-accepted-at-formats-2015/The paper entitled “Multi-Objective Parameter Synthesis in Probabilistic Hybrid Systems” by Martin Fränzle, Sebastian Gerwinn, Paul Kröger (all Oldenburg), Alessandro Abate (Oxford) and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted at the 13th Int. Conf. on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems. This paper presents a method to synthesize parameter instances (if such exist) of probabilistic hybrid automata satisfying a multi-objective bounded horizon specification over expected rewards.Fri, 19 Jun 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-06-03-two-papers-accepted-at-mfcs-40/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-06-03-two-papers-accepted-at-mfcs-40/The paper “On the Hardness of Almost-Sure Termination” by Benjamin Kaminski and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted at the 40th MFCS (Mathematical Foundations in Computer Science) conference in Milano. This paper considers the computational hardness of computing expected outcomes and deciding (universal) (positive) almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs with non-determinism.Wed, 03 Jun 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-05-25-prophesy-has-been-cav-artifact-evaluated/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-05-25-prophesy-has-been-cav-artifact-evaluated/We are happy to announce that our tool PROPhESY: A PRObabilistic ParamEter SYnthesis has successfully passed the CAV 2015 Artifact Evaluation. The purpose of the evaluation is to provide a service by the community to help authors provide more substantial supplements to their papers so future researchers can more effectively build on and compare with previous work.Mon, 25 May 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-05-17-falak-sher-successfully-defended-his-phd-dissertation/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-05-17-falak-sher-successfully-defended-his-phd-dissertation/Friday April 24, Falak Sher successfully defended his PhD dissertation, entitled “Abstraction and Refinement of Probabilistic Automata using Modal Stochastic Games” for a jury consisting of Lijun Zhang (ISCAS Beijing, China), Stefan Kowalewski, Erich Grädel, and Joost-Pieter Katoen (all Aachen). Falak’s dissertation is concerned with game-based abstraction-refinement in which (instead of existing works) the underlying correctness notion is based on distribution-based (rather than state-based)…Sun, 17 May 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-05-17-paper-accepted-at-mfps-xxxi/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-05-17-paper-accepted-at-mfps-xxxi/The paper “Conditioning in Probabilistic Programming” by Friedrich Gretz, Nils Jansen, Benjamin Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Annabelle McIver, and Federico Olmedo has been accepted at the 31st Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics Conference. The paper provides an operational and wp-semantics for an imperative probabilistic programming language with conditioning, studies their relation, and shows its usage for program transformations.Sun, 17 May 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-05-12-sommerfest-2015/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-05-12-sommerfest-2015/The website for this year’s Sommerfest is now live! You can find it at https://sommerfest-informatik.de. This year it is organized by our group, and will take place June 26th. The three main events, Karriere, Kluge Kopfe and Coole Party, promise to make it a great day. Visit the link if you want to know more.Tue, 12 May 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-04-18-paper-accepted-at-cav-2015/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-04-18-paper-accepted-at-cav-2015/Our paper “PROPhESY: A PRObabilistic ParamEter SYnthesis Tool” by Christian Dehnert, Sebastian Junges, Nils Jansen, Florian Corzilius, Matthias Volk, Harold Bruintjes, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Erika Ábrahám was accepted for publication at the 27th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV) 2015. The paper presents the tool PROPhESY, which is dedicated to model checking and parameter synthesis for parametric discrete-time Markov chains. It features novel and efficient model…Sat, 18 Apr 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-04-03-paper-accepted-at-asmta-2015/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-04-03-paper-accepted-at-asmta-2015/The paper “Model Checking of Open Interval Markov Chains” by Souymodip Chakraborty and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted at the 22nd International Conference on Analytical & Stochastic Modelling Techniques & Applications (ASMTA 2015). The paper shows that interval MCs with open intervals can be verified by re-using techniques for closed interval MCs.Fri, 03 Apr 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-04-03-paper-accepted-at-dsn-2015/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-04-03-paper-accepted-at-dsn-2015/The paper “A statistical approach for timed reachability in AADL models” by Harold Bruintjes, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and David Lesens (Airbus Defense & Space) has been accepted at the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2015, acceptance rate 21,8%). The paper presents a statistical model checker for checking timed and stochastic AADL models against timed reachability properties.Fri, 03 Apr 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-03-24-paper-accepted-at-fm-2015/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-03-24-paper-accepted-at-fm-2015/The paper “Counterexamples for Expected Rewards” by Tim Quatmann, Nils Jansen, Christian Dehnert, Ralf Wimmer, Erika Ábrahám, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Bernd Becker was accepted for publication at the 20th International Symposium on Formal Methods (FM) 2015. The paper presents the first approaches on counterexamples for discrete-time Markov chains and expected reward properties. Methods are proposed to extract a minimal subsystem which already leads to costs beyond the allowed bound. Besides…Tue, 24 Mar 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-03-20-jonathan-heinen-successfully-defended-his-phd-dissertation/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-03-20-jonathan-heinen-successfully-defended-his-phd-dissertation/Monday March 9, Jonathan Heinen successfully defended his PhD dissertation, entitled “Verification of Java Programs: A Graph Grammar Approach” for a jury consisting of Arend Rensink (Twente, NL), Thomas Seidl, Martin Grohe, and Joost-Pieter Katoen (all Aachen). Jonathan’s dissertation deals with the automated verification of pointer operations in Java Bytecode programs using quantified LTL where graph properties are expressed as MSP formulas.Fri, 20 Mar 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-03-03-carsten-kern-became-professor-at-oth-regensburg/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-03-03-carsten-kern-became-professor-at-oth-regensburg/Carsten Kern, formerly a PhD student at Chair i2, recently obtained a Professorship at the Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule in Regensburg (Bavaria). We congratulate him with this success and wish him a lot of success in Regensburg!Tue, 03 Mar 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-01-22-arpit-sharma-m-sc-successfully-defended-his-phd-dissertation/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-01-22-arpit-sharma-m-sc-successfully-defended-his-phd-dissertation/On January 15, 2015, Arpit Sharma has successfully defended his dissertation on “Reduction Techniques for Nondeterministic and Probabilistic Systems”. His defense committee consisted of Christof Löding, Holger Hermanns (Saarland University), Joost-Pieter Katoen and Bernhard Rumpe (see picture). Arpit’s dissertation treats weighted lumpability as well as layering techniques for various models.Thu, 22 Jan 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-01-21-paper-accepted-at-nfm-2015/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2015-01-21-paper-accepted-at-nfm-2015/Our paper “A Greedy Approach for the Efficient Repair of Stochastic Models” by Shashank Pathak, Erika Ábrahám, Nils Jansen, Armando Tacchella, and Joost-Pieter Katoen was accepted at NFM 2015. The paper addresses the problem of model repair for parametric discrete-time Markov chains which consists of changing a model with minimal costs such that a desired property is satisfied. We present a greedy algorithm iteratively changing probability distributions. We show the correctness in the sense…Wed, 21 Jan 2015 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-12-31-call-for-abstracts-ffm-2015/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-12-31-call-for-abstracts-ffm-2015/RWTH Aachen hosts the Young Researchers’ Conference “Frontiers in Formal Methods”, February 25-27 2015. Young researchers (up to two years after completing their PhD thesis) are encouraged to submit a 2-5 page abstract by January 12, 2015 (extended firm deadline). More information can be found here.Wed, 31 Dec 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-12-14-hongfei-fu-m-eng-successfully-defended-his-phd-dissertation/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-12-14-hongfei-fu-m-eng-successfully-defended-his-phd-dissertation/Hongfei Fu has successfully defended his PhD dissertation entitled “Verifying Probabilistic Systems: New Algorithms and Complexity Results”. Hongfei started his PhD research in autumn 2010. His examiners were Antonin Kucera (Masaryk University, Brno), Wolfgang Thomas and Stefan Kowalewski (see picture).Sun, 14 Dec 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-12-04-mark-timmer-receives-overijssel-phd-award/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-12-04-mark-timmer-receives-overijssel-phd-award/Mark Timmer received the award for the best PhD dissertation in 2013 in the region Overijssel, the Netherlands for his thesis Efficient Modelling, Generation and Analysis of Markov Automata. Mark obtained his PhD degree from the University of Twente, and was supervised by Joost-Pieter Katoen, Jaco van de Pol and Marielle Stoelinga. See also https://www.utwente.nl/nieuwsevents/!/2014/11/350971/overijssel-phd-award-voor-mark-timmer.Thu, 04 Dec 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-10-07-paper-accepted-for-lmcs/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-10-07-paper-accepted-for-lmcs/Our paper “High-level Counterexamples for Probabilistic Automata” by Ralf Wimmer, Nils Jansen, Erika Ábrahám and Joost-Pieter Katoen was accepted for publication in the journal Logical Methods in Computer Science (LMCS). In this paper we investigate the computation of several variations of (minimal) counterexamples that are represented in PRISM’s high-level language which defines a subclass of probabilistic programs. These NP-hard problems are solved via mixed-integer linear programming (MILP).…Tue, 07 Oct 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-09-12-best-paper-award-at-facs-2014/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-09-12-best-paper-award-at-facs-2014/The paper “Compositional Analysis Using Component-Oriented Interpolation” by Viet Yen Nguyen, Benjamin Bittner, Joost-Pieter Katoen, and Thomas Noll has received the Best Paper Award at the 11th International Symposium on Formal Aspects of Component Software (FACS 2014). It presents a novel abstraction technique that exploits the compositionality of a concurrent system consisting of interacting components.Fri, 12 Sep 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-07-04-paper-accepted-emsoft-2014/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-07-04-paper-accepted-emsoft-2014/The paper “Exponentially timed SADF: Compositional semantics, reduction, and analysis” by Joost-Pieter Katoen and Hao (Stephen) Wu has been accepted for EMSOFT’14 in New Delhi. The paper presents a compositional semantics of SADF using Markov automata, shows that non-determinism cannot occur, and exploits confluence reduction for scaling quantitative evaluation.Fri, 04 Jul 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-30-award-for-best-master-studies/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-30-award-for-best-master-studies/Sergey Sazonov, who completed his master thesis on “Property preservation under bisimulations on Markov Automata” at our chair, received an award of the CS department for completing his master studies with excellent grades. Congratulations!Mon, 30 Jun 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-29-paper-accepted-at-atva14/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-29-paper-accepted-at-atva14/Our paper “Fast Debugging of PRISM Models” by Christian Dehnert, Nils Jansen, Ralf Wimmer, Erika Ábrahám and Joost-Pieter Katoen was accepted at ATVA 2014. The paper presents a new way to compute critical parts of a PRISM program by utilizing a MAX-SAT solver. This is the first approach rendering the computation of these sort of high-level counterexamples feasible for problems of practical relevance.Sun, 29 Jun 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-26-nacht-der-professoren/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-26-nacht-der-professoren/Joost-Pieter Katoen puts on some music at around 23:00 on Friday June 27. The entry fees are used to support students in third World countries.Thu, 26 Jun 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-26-paper-accepted-at-concur14/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-26-paper-accepted-at-concur14/The paper “Tight Game Abstractions of Probabilistic Automata” by Falak Sher and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted at the conference Concurrency Theory. The paper presents game-based abstraction that is based on abstracting distributions (rather than states) and shows that this yields more accurate abstraction than state-based abstractions.Thu, 26 Jun 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-26-paper-accepted-at-ifip-tcs14/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-26-paper-accepted-at-ifip-tcs14/The paper “Parametric LTL on Markov Chains” by Souymodip Chakraborty and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted at the IFIP TCS conference. The paper shows the undecidability of verifying a Markov chain against a parametric LTL (pLTL) formula, and studies the complexity of model checking several logical fragments of pLTL.Thu, 26 Jun 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-17-paper-accepted-at-tcs/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-17-paper-accepted-at-tcs/The paper “Minimal Counterexamples for Linear-Time Probabilistic Verification” by Ralf Wimmer, Nils Jansen, Erika Ábrahám, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Bernd Becker was accepted for publication in the journal Theoretical Computer Science. The paper thoroughly examines the possibilities for computing so-called minimal critical subsystems for Markov decision processes by means of mixed integer linear programming.Tue, 17 Jun 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-05-survey-paper-probabilistic-counterexamples/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-06-05-survey-paper-probabilistic-counterexamples/A survey paper concerning the generation of counterexamples for probabilistic systems was published by Erika Ábrahám, Bernd Becker, Christian Dehnert, Nils Jansen, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Ralf Wimmer within the scope of the PhD school SFM in Bertinoro, Italy. This paper gives a nice introduction to the foundations and the state-of-the-art of this topic, explaining all methods by means of many examples.Thu, 05 Jun 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-05-14-paper-accepted-at-qest-2014/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-05-14-paper-accepted-at-qest-2014/The paper “Accelerating Parametric Probabilistic Verification” by Nils Jansen, Florian Corzilius, Matthias Volk, Ralf Wimmer, Erika Ábrahám, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Bernd Becker was accepted at QEST 2014 in Florence. The paper considers a new approach on Model Checking parametric discrete-time Markov chains based on eliminating the strongly connected components of the system graph. Together with a novel technique on factorizing the occurring polynomials, this leads to high improvements in the…Wed, 14 May 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-05-14-two-papers-accepted-at-icgt-2014/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-05-14-two-papers-accepted-at-icgt-2014/The papers “Generating Inductive Predicates for Symbolic Execution of Pointer-Manipulating Programs” by Christina Jansen, Florian Göbe, and Thomas Noll, and “Generating Abstract Graph-Based Procedure Summaries for Pointer Programs” by Christina Jansen and Thomas Noll have been accepted at ICGT 2014 in York, GB. The former paper relates two abstraction approaches for pointer programs, graph grammars and separation logic, while the latter presents an interprocedural dataflow analysis to…Wed, 14 May 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-04-24-two-papers-accepted-at-csl-lics/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-04-24-two-papers-accepted-at-csl-lics/The papers “Probably Safe or Live” by Katoen, Song and Zhang, and “Zero-Reachability in Probabilistic Multi-Counter Automata” by Brazdil, Kiefer, Kucera, Novotny and Katoen have been accepted at CSL-LICS 2014 in Vienna. The former paper classifies safety and liveness properties in the probabilistic setting while the second paper sets the ground for showing some flaws in classical ergodicity results about stochastic Petri nets.Thu, 24 Apr 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-03-26-acsd-2014-paper-accepted/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-03-26-acsd-2014-paper-accepted/The paper entitled “Layered Reduction for Abstract Probabilistic Automata” by Arpit Sharma and Joost-Pieter Katoen has been accepted for the 14th Int. Conf. on Application of Concurrency on System Design (ACSD) 2014.Wed, 26 Mar 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-03-10-bizarre-concurrency-workshop/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-03-10-bizarre-concurrency-workshop/We organize a workshop on “Bizarre Concurrency” in Aachen, together with Roland Meyer, Markus Müller-Olm and Heike Wehrheim. It will take place March 24th and 25th. Topic: new concurrency theory for modern memory models of microprocessors and geo-replicated data (consistency). See here for the Workshop Programme SPP.Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-03-01-new-moves-member/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-03-01-new-moves-member/Federico Olmedo joint our group! Federico did his PhD with Gilles Barthe in Madrid, Spain on probabilistic programs in security. He started as postdoc on the project “Automated Analysis of Probabilistic Programs”.Sat, 01 Mar 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-02-20-dagstuhl-seminar-accepted/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2014-02-20-dagstuhl-seminar-accepted/Our Dagstuhl Seminar on “Challenges and Trends in Probabilistic Programming” with Gilles Barthe, Andy Gordon and Annabelle McIver in April 2015, has been accepted.Thu, 20 Feb 2014 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2013-09-17-academia-europaea-appointment/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2013-09-17-academia-europaea-appointment/Joost-Pieter Katoen has been appointed as a member of the renowned Academia Europaea (Academy of Europe), a European, non-governmental association acting as an Academy whose members are scientists and scholars who collectively aim to promote learning, education and research.Tue, 17 Sep 2013 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2013-08-07-vacancies-for-postdoctoral-researchers/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2013-08-07-vacancies-for-postdoctoral-researchers/The Software Modeling and Verification Group (MOVES, moves.rwth-aachen.de) at RWTH Aachen University offers openings for several postdoctoral researchers in the area of “Automated Analysis of Probabilistic Programs” Deadline for application: August 15, 2013. Starting dates: autumn 2013 and summer 2014. With about 38,000 students, 480 professors as well as 4,500 academic staff, RWTH Aachen University (www.rwth-aachen.de) is one of the largest technical universities in Europe. Recently, it has…Wed, 07 Aug 2013 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2013-05-06-distinguished-professorship/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2013-05-06-distinguished-professorship/Joost-Pieter Katoen has been awarded a Distinguished Professorship from the RWTH Aachen University.Mon, 06 May 2013 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2013-03-20-68/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2013-03-20-68/Joost-Pieter Katoen has been elected as Steering Committee Chair of ETAPS (www.etaps.org), the largest conference on theory and practice of software in Europe. He is the first non-UK ETAPS SC chair since the conference was initiated in 1998. More information here.Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:00:00 GMThttps://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2013-02-06-moves-in-alumni-magazine/https://moves.rwth-aachen.de/news/2013-02-06-moves-in-alumni-magazine/The Alumni-Magazine of RWTH Aachen University contains an interview with our former PhD student and postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Tingting Han.Wed, 06 Feb 2013 12:00:00 GMT