RSI Awarded Small Business Innovation Research Grant

Falls Church, VA (November 7, 2006) -- Reactive Systems, Inc. (RSI) has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research Grant by the Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Laboratory. The project titled "A Software Hub for High Assurance Model-Driven Development and Analysis" aims to increase the level of interoperability among model-based design tools that use different modeling notations.

A number of different modeling notations are currently used by companies developing embedded software applications. These include the Simulink/Stateflow (the language supported by RSI's Reactis testing and validation package), UML, Scade, and others. As soon as an organization selects a language, they are locked-in to the tool chain supporting the language. Few tools support multiple languages.

In parallel with the commercial development of modeling languages and simulation tools, the Computer-Science research community has developed an array of formal-verification tools, including model checkers, theorem provers, and consistency checkers. These tools analyze models at a level of mathematically rigor that traditional, testing-based verification and validation approaches cannot approach; the level of confidence they can provide in models is therefore much higher. The integration of such analysis tools into model-based design processes has the potential to dramatically improve the quality of embedded software applications while at the same reducing the costs associated with deploying such applications. A major obstacle to such an integration is the fact that each verification tool employs a different modeling notation and they typically do not support those notations used in commercial settings.

The SBIR research project under way at RSI aims to remedy this lack of interoperability through the construction of a software hub. The envisioned framework will consist of a general-purpose, intermediate specification language that will serve as the means of communication among various tools. The hub will include translators from various commercial modeling notations such as Simulink/Stateflow and UML into the hub language, as well as translators from the hub language to various analysis engines.

About Reactis. RSI's Reactis tool provides automated test- generation and model-validation capabilities for Simulink/Stateflow models of control software. The tool can be used to test for conformance between a model and implementation code, and it can also be employed to validate model behavior. Reactis has over 35 customers in the automotive and aerospace industries.

About Reactive Systems. Reactive Systems, founded in 1999, is a privately held company based in the Washington DC suburb of Falls Church, VA. For more information about RSI visit www.reactive-systems.com or call +1-703-534-6458.

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