Dept. Reliability Systems and Software

The “reliability of systems and software” (RSS) conducts research work centred around two complementary research activities

• the design of rigorous techniques and methods supporting the development of high quality software and systems;
• the development of high quality systems and software using rigorous methods and techniques;

with a permanent focus on the production of an assessment of the quality (safety, security, reliability, etc.)  of the developed systems and software.

Several application domains are targeted by the studies achieved in RSS: embedded systems and cyber-physical systems, human computer interaction, distributed systems, numerical computation in transportation systems, medical systems, etc.

Scientific themes

The research activities of the department study the development of high quality complex systems and software and the processes supporting such developments with a major focus on the assessment of the quality (time, safety, security, usability, etc.) of these systems and processes. The studied systems and software may be either process or data based, centralized or distributed, close or open loop controlled systems, communicating and interacting with the users and the environment, hybrid with both discrete and continuous behaviours and may involve both software and hardware. On the software process side the departement worked on a change‐aware process management system that allows process actors reporting emergent changes, analysing possible impacts, and notifying people affected by the changes.

The applications targeted by these studies are critical systems like embedded systems, transportation systems, medical systems, etc.

The department activities take part in the IRIT main research topic: “Design and Construction of systems (reliable, safe, adaptive, distributed, communicating, dynamic, …”. The target applications belong to the strategic application domains identified at IRIT: “on the application domains “Aeronautics and Space, transport” or “Security of Heritage and People” and “ Health, autonomy, living, and well-being”.

Structure of the department.

According to the structure adopted at IRIT, the RSS department is composed of 4 research teams: ACADIE, ARGOS, ICS and SM@RT with 34 permanent researchers and 24 PhD students and postdocs (January 2019).

The 4 research teams belong to 4 different universities: Université Paul Sabatier (UPS), INPT-ENSEEIHT, Université Toulouse 2 Jean-Jaurès (UT2J) and Université Toulouse 1 Capitole (UT1C). They are spread on 7 geographical sites (UPS IRIT, UPS IUT A, ENSEEIHT, UT1 Capitole, IUT Rodez , UT2J, IUT Blagnac) with the following distribution: ACADIE (19 at ENSEEIHT and 10 at UPS), ARGOS (2 at UPS, 4 at UPS-IUTA, 1 at UT2J and 1 UT2J IUT Blagnac), ICS (2 at UPS and 1 at UT1C) and SM@RT (5 at UT2J).