HATS stands for Highly Adaptable and Trustworthy Software using Formal Models and is an Integrated Project supported the 7th Framework Programme of the EC within the FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) scheme.
Software systems are central for the infrastructure of modern society. To justify the huge investments such systems need to live for decades. This requires software which is highly adaptable. Software systems must support a high degree of spatial variability to accommodate a range of requirements and operating conditions, and temporal evolvability to allow these parameters to change over time.
Current approaches to reusability and maintenance are inadequate to cope with the dynamics and longevity of future software applications and infrastructures, e.g. for e-commerce, e-health and e-government. At the same time, we rely increasingly on systems that provide a high degree of trustworthiness. The major challenge facing software construction in the next decades is high adaptability combined with trustworthiness. A severe limitation of current development practices is the missing rigor of models and property specifications. Without a formal notation of distributed, component-based systems it is impossible to achieve automation for consistency checking, enforcement of security, generation of trustworthy code, etc. Furthermore, it does not suffice to simply extend current formal approaches.
We propose to take an empirically successful, yet informal software development paradigm and put it on a formal basis. Specifically, in HATS we will turn software product family (SWPF) development into a rigorous approach. The technical core of the project is an Abstract Behavioral Specification language which will allow precise description of SWPF features and components and their instances. The main project outcome is a methodological and tool framework achieving not merely far-reaching automation in maintaining dynamically evolving software, but an unprecedented level of trust while informal processes are replaced with rigorous analyses based on formal semantics.
HATS Project No.: FP7-231620
The HATS project finished on 31. March 2013.
All activities, objectives, milestones, and deliverables were achieved as planned and on time.
The final project review took place in April 2013. All deliverables were approved and the project has been assessed with “excellent progress”, the highest possible assessment level.
From the final consolidated review report: “The project has made significant progress towards the understanding and support of program variability and evolution. It paves the way towards an increased adoption of formal methods in software development practice.”
The executable modeling language ABS and its associated toolbox that were developed during the course of HATS will continue to be maintained and expanded in the new FP7 project ENVISAGE: Engineering Virtualized Services. We are also in the process of building a web portal for everyone interested in ABS.
This website will be kept available for reference and access to HATS deliverables and papers.