Ongoing Research Projects
EU: AMVAD - Additive Manufacturing for Ventricular Assist Devices (2023-2025)
Heart failure is the most common cause of hospitalization. In a severe course of heart failure, the heart is no longer able to supply the body with sufficient nutrients. The implantation of a heart support system can become a life-sustaining therapy in this case. In this case, an artificial pump is connected directly to the patient's heart via cannulas. Special anatomical conditions also pose special challenges for the geometry of the cannulae. Additive manufacturing technologies can open up forward-looking approaches to solving these problems. [more...]
DFG: IDEFIX - Identifying and Fixing Incomplete Patches (2022-2025)
Re-opened bugs due to incomplete patches by developers are a major cost driver for software projects. In this project, we aim to investigate patches and identify whether there are alternative execution paths leading to a problematic code line where, e.g., a crash has occurred or an exception has been raised. If these paths are not covered by an existing patch, a tool should inform the developer of related inputs that induce them and recommend potential patches for these paths. To clarify this idea, let us consider a program, where fix1 represents the original patch that covers path1−3, and path4−7 are unknown to the developer [more...]
DFG: EMPEROR - Learning the Cause of Program Behavior (2022-2025)
All program behavior is triggered by some program input. Which parts of the input do trigger program behaviors, and how? In the EMPEROR project, we aim to automatically produce explanations for program behaviors — notably program failures. To this end, we (1) use grammars that separate inputs into individual elements; (2) learn statistical relations between features of input elements and program behavior; and (3) use systematic tests to strengthen or refute inferred associations, including internal features of the execution. [more...]
DFG: ProCI - Process Conformance under Incomplete Information (2020-2023)
Process-aware information systems coordinate the execution of a set of elementary actions to reach a business goal, where actions may be as fine-grained as function calls or as coarsegrained as complex business transactions. The behaviour of such systems is commonly described by process models. However, once data is recorded during runtime, typically in the form of logs or streams of events, the question of conformance emerges: how do the modelled behaviour of a system and its recorded behaviour relate to each other? Answering this question is the basis for the detection, interpretation, and compensation of any deviation between a model of a process-oriented system and its actual execution.[more...]
DFG: FLASH - Fitness Landscape Analysis to improve Search Heuristics (2019-2022)
Many software engineering tasks can be formulated as optimization problems and can be automatically solved with different search heuristics/algorithms. Examples for typical software engineering problems, where optimization methods can be used, are requirements prioritization, release planning, architecture and design optimization, automatic program repair, test suite generation and augmentation, and test case selection and prioritization. However, for most of these problems the characteristics of the search space and fitness landscape are usually not known, which leads to algorithm selection on a trail-and-error basis. Furthermore, search spaces as given in the following figure can be diverse and may also vary from problem instance to problem instance. A better understanding of the different search problems will lead to better algorithm selection and parameter tuning. Consequently, the FLASH project aims to perform a systematic descriptive study to classify fitness landscapes.[more...]