Abstract
Software systems sense and affect real world objects and processes in order to realize important real-world systems. For these systems to function correctly, such software should obey constraints inherited from the real world. Typically, neither important characteristics of real-world entities nor the relationships between such entities and their machine-world representations are specified explicitly in code, and important opportunities for detecting errors due to mismatches are lost. To address this problem we introduce real-world types to document in software both relevant characteristics of real-world entities and the relationships between real-world entities and machine-level representations. These constructs support specification and automated static detection of such mismatches in programs written in ordinary languages. We present a prototype implementation of our approach for Java and case studies in which previously unrecognized real-world type errors in several real systems were detected.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by Dependable Computing LLC, in part by the National Science Foundation grant number 1400294, and in part by the U.S. Department of Defense under Contract H98230-08-D- 0171. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Department of Defense.
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Xiang, J., Knight, J., Sullivan, K. (2015). Real-World Types and Their Application. In: Koornneef, F., van Gulijk, C. (eds) Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security. SAFECOMP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9337. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24255-2_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24255-2_34
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