Academic team behind preeminent software tool recognised with ETAPS award

Professors Marta Kwiatkowska and David Parker, alongside longtime collaborator Dr Gethin Norman of the University of Glasgow, have been awarded the 2024 ETAPS Test-of-Time Tool Award for their leading software tool PRISM. 

PRISM has been in continuous development for more that 20 years and, overseen by the academic team, it is today the most widely used tool of its kind, modelling and analysing the behaviour of real-world systems whose behaviour exhibits uncertainty or randomness. It is used to study a diverse range of applications, from internet security protocols and quantum cryptography to protein interactions in human cells. 

The award from ETAPS, the primary European forum for academic and industrial researchers working in software science, recognises outstanding research tools that have demonstrated high quality, reliability and lasting impact over recent years. 

I am very pleased to receive this award for PRISM, which is the result of teamwork over many years and would not have been possible without the help of my collaborators. Many novel scientific insights were gained through applying PRISM in a range of application domains.  Marta Kwiatkowska, Professor of Computing Systems

The tool is particularly well suited to safety-critical applications, whether assessing the reliability of airbag control software or building robust controllers for autonomous mobile robots in hazardous environments. It has been used in industrial projects and labs, including cloud computing at Fujitsu, fault-tolerant architectures at Honeywell and airbag safety at TRW Automotive. 

I am delighted and honoured to win this award for PRISM, which has been a focal point of my research career. It has been a privilege to work with so many contributors to the project and to see the impact it has had. David Parker, Professor of Computer Science

PRISM is based on rigorous, mathematical foundations, with more than 850 research papers having been published describing the tool, its applications and projects that build upon it. Its modelling language has become a de facto standard for representing probabilistic models within the formal verification community, and has been adopted and extended by many other tools. PRISM is also widely used to support teaching of verification, including at Oxford for the past 15 years. The software is open-source and has been adapted and enhanced by researchers worldwide. 

The award was presented to the team at this year's ETAPS conference in Luxembourg on 10 April 2024. The conference is the foremost annual European event related to software sciences, with more than 500 researchers participating every year.  

Find out more about PRISM: https://prismmodelchecker.org/ 
Find out more about the ETAPS award: https://etaps.org/awards/test-of-time-tool/