Formal approaches for the design of adaptive distributed applications

Keywords: Formal Methods, Distributed Application, Adaptation, Auto Repair

Description: Adaptive distributed applications are characterized by the distribution of their components and also by possible reconfigurations during their execution. To ensure the reliability of these applications it is necessary to validate their design and to manage them during execution. We use formal methods and techniques as a means to precisely specify, validate and verify these applications. Thus, we define an adequate formal notation for modeling their various aspects. We also provide methodologies that guide their design and systematize their validation and verification. At the same time, we offer tools that help implementing adaptive applications according to modern implementation technology standards (e.g. EJB, Web Services, P2P, ....). Indeed, our studies cover almost the entire cycle of development and all aspects characterizing adaptive distributed applications.

Deployment and management of adaptive distributed applications

Keywords: Modeling, Deployment, Adaptive Applications

Description: This topic focuses on the deployment of distributed applications over a network or over a grid of processors. The location problem has been the subject of several studies and it is still an attractive direction for many new research works. It aims at optimizing the allocation of processes on different processors. Furthermore, taking into account the dynamicity of the execution environment, we are interested in finding effective solutions to ensure a certain quality of services and to address the failures that can occur when running an application. In addition, we seek to provide solutions for the management and the control of software architectures in such a way to maintain the consistency of these applications throughout their execution.

Distributed Mobile-Agent Based Applications

Keywords: Multi-agent system, Distributed Applications, Specification, Distributed computing

Description: Modern distributed systems must meet new requirements of dynamicity and mobility of new modern execution platforms. Solutions are available for static distributed environments. Neveertheless, these solutions are inadequate in the case of dynamic systems. This research topic focuses on the use of mobile-agent technology to provide solutions to fundamental problems that arise in distributed systems, such as the spanning tree and the election problems. The main objective is to identify and examine models based on mobile-agents for the implementation and the execution of distributed algorithms over dynamic environments.

Modeling and Evaluation of the Quality-of-service of Ad-hoc Networks

Keywords: Web services, Quality-of-Service rating

Description: This topic concerns the study and the evaluation of the quality-of-service during the migration from a wired to an ad-hoc network as a medium of communication between computers. Current progress in the domain of networks is covering a wide spectrum of services. It has allowed to move from classical infrastructures providing a minimum set of services towards more sophisticated and programmable architectures providing a range of complex services.