Systems Analysis Group

Not only does the analysis of distributed systems typically grow significantly more complex with each additional node, many traditional analysis methods fail to cover the distributed case completely. The primary research focus of the COMSYS Systems Analysis Group is to develop novel and improved approaches to managing the complexity in Distributed Systems Analysis.

The testability and, in a more general sense, verification of Distributed Systems is one of our major areas of research. We employ different techniques, like Symbolic Execution and Discrete Event Simulation, to find possible errors at scale.

Available Theses

The Systems Analysis Group always has a range of thesis topics available for motivated and talented students. An excerpt of available theses can be seen from inside the RWTH University network.

(Past) Projects

Selected Publications

A Deterministic Memory Allocator for Dynamic Symbolic Execution. European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2022). June 2022.
On Automated Memoization in the Field of Simulation Parameter Studies. ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS), vol. 28, no. 4. October 2018.
PARTI: A Multi-interval Theory Solver for Symbolic Execution. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE'18), Montpellier, France. September 2018.
Towards Benchmark Optimization by Automated Equivalence Detection. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Benchmarking Cyber-Physical Networks and Systems (CPSBench'18), Apr 10 - Apr 13, 2018, Porto, Portugal. April 2018.
Automated Memoization: Automatically Identifying Memoization Units in Simulation Parameter Studies. Proceedings of the 21st IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2017), Oct 18 - Oct 20, 2017, Rome, Italy. October 2017.
Floating-Point Symbolic Execution: A Case Study in N-Version Programming. Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA. October 2017.
Code-transparent Discrete Event Simulation for Time-accurate Wireless Prototyping. Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGSIM/PADS Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (SIGSIM-PADS’17), May 24 - May 26, 2017, Singapore, Singapore. May 2017.
Automated Memoization for Parameter Studies Implemented in Impure Languages. Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGSIM/PADS Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (SIGSIM-PADS’16), Banff, AB, Canada. May 2016.
Integration Testing of Protocol Implementations using Symbolic Distributed Execution. The 2nd International Workshop on Rigorous Protocol Engineering (WRiPE 2012), Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2012, Austin, TX, USA. October 2012.
Scalable Symbolic Execution of Distributed Systems. Proceedings of the 31st IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2011), Jun 20 - Jun 24, 2011, Minneapolis, MN, USA. June 2011.
Demo Abstract: Integrating Symbolic Execution with Sensornet Simulation for Efficient Bug Finding. Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2010), Zurich, Switzerland. November 2010.
KleeNet: Discovering Insidious Interaction Bugs in Wireless Sensor Networks Before Deployment. Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2010), Stockholm, Sweden. April 2010.
Poster Abstract: KleeNet - Automatic Bug Hunting in Sensor Network Applications. Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Embedded network sensor systems (SenSys'08), Raleigh, NC, United States. November 2008.
Bug Hunting in Sensor Network Applications. Proceedings of the 7th GI/ITG Fachgespraech Wireless Sensor Networks, Berlin, Germany. September 2008.