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Static Analysis for the VErification of Spreadsheets
Spreadsheet applications (such as Microsoft Excel + VBA) are heavily used in a wide range of fields including engineering, finance, management, statistics and health. However, they do not ensure robustness properties, thus spreads... Spreadsheet applications (such as Microsoft Excel + VBA) are heavily used in a wide range of fields including engineering, finance, management, statistics and health. However, they do not ensure robustness properties, thus spreadsheet errors are hard to avoid, common and potentially very costly. According to estimates, the annual cost of spreadsheet errors is around 7 billion dollars. For instance, in 2013, a series of basic spreadsheet errors at JPMorgan incurred 6 billion dollars trading losses. To avoid such problems, spreadsheet users need better support from rigorous tools, since the development of industrial spreadsheets typically involves multiple tabs, formulas, macros and data read from external sources (e.g., the internet). However, as of today, spreadsheet environment offer almost no verification support, and third party tools do not allow to reason correctly over macros, and future uses of existing formulas. The MemCAD ERC StG project opened the way to novel formal analysis techniques for spreadsheet applications. Indeed, the MemCAD project led to the design of powerful abstraction techniques to reason over complex data-structures such as tables as found in spreadsheets. During this project, we have implemented AiXL, a prototype that was able to analyze large public benchmarks. It uncovered defects that are beyond the scope of other approaches. We propose to leverage these results into a toolbox able to safely verify, optimize and maintain spreadsheets, so as to reduce the likelihood of errors. The envisioned toolbox relies on automatic and conservative semantic static analysis, so that it will report all occurrences of certain classes of errors. It will have an open architecture with plugins, and will easily extend to user specific properties. This works will take place in a partnership with MatrixLEAD, a startup created based on the results of the ERC MemCAD project. MatrixLEAD will provide industrial use-cases and commercialization plans. ver más
31/12/2020
150K€
Duración del proyecto: 26 meses Fecha Inicio: 2018-10-23
Fecha Fin: 2020-12-31

Línea de financiación: concedida

El organismo H2020 notifico la concesión del proyecto el día 2020-12-31
Línea de financiación objetivo El proyecto se financió a través de la siguiente ayuda:
Presupuesto El presupuesto total del proyecto asciende a 150K€
Líder del proyecto
INSTITUT NATIONAL DE RECHERCHE EN INFORMATIQU... No se ha especificado una descripción o un objeto social para esta compañía.
Perfil tecnológico TRL 4-5