Robyn R. Lutz
Professor

Office: 228 Atanasoff Phone: (515) 294-3654 Fax: (515) 294-0258 Email: rlutz at cs.iastate.edu (replace " at " with "@") Homepage: http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~rlutz/homepage.html

Current Affiliations

• Senior Engineer, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

Research Interests

Safety-critical product lines
Requirements engineering
Software safety
Formal methods for specification and analysis
Fault monitoring and recovery
Software engineering

Research Areas

Software Engineering, Software Systems, Information Security

Research Statement

Dr. Lutz's research interests are in two overlapping areas of software engineering: (1) how to build safe systems and (2) how to specify and analyze requirements. In the first area, her work focues on software safety, safety-critical product lines, and defect analysis. In the second area, Dr. Lutz is investigating formal modeling and analysis of requirements, especially for fault detection and recovery. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation and by NASA.

Education

Ph.D.   University of Kansas   1980

Honors and Awards

Best Research Paper  ""Empirical Analysis of Safety-Critical Anomalies during Operations"", NASA Software Assurance Symposium, 2004

Most Influential Paper from RE'93  ""Analyzing Software Requirements Errors in Safety-Critical, Embedded Systems"", IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, 2003

Best Experience Paper  ""On-Going Requirements Discovery in High-Integrity Systems"", IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, 2003

Outstanding Contributions to Software Assurance Research  NASA Office of Safety and Mission Assurance Software Assurance Symposium, 2002

Current Grants

SHF: Small: Evidence-based Reliability Assessment of Software Product Lines. R. Lutz and K. Goseva-Popstojanova. NSF (2009-2012). $248,902.

Using Auto-Generated Diagnostic Trees To Support Verification of Safety-Critical Test Procedures. R. Lutz and A. Patterson-Hine. NASA (2008-2011). $640,000.

Interactive and Verifiable Composition of Web Services to Satisfy End-User Goals. S. Basu, V. Honavar. NSF (2007-2010). $347,002.

Safety Analysis of Evolving Product Lines. Robyn Lutz. National Science Foundation (2006-2010). $318,400.

Product-Line Verification of Safety-Critical Software (awarded to Jet Propulsion Laboratory). Ann Patterson-Hine. NASA (2007-2009). $450,000.

Representative Publications

Refereed Journal and Conference Publications

J. Pathak, S. Basu, R. Lutz, V. Honavar. MoSCoE: An Approach for Composing Web Services Through Iterative Reformulation of Functional Specification. International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools. Vol. 17. No. 1. pp. 109-138, 2008.

R. Lutz, A. Patterson-Hine, S. Nelson, C. Frost, D. Tal, and R. Harris. “Using Obstacle Analysis to Identify Contingency Requirements on an Unpiloted Aerial Vehicle". Requirements Engineering Journal. Vol. 12. No. 1. pp. 41-45., Accepted, 2007.

J. Dehlinger and R. Lutz. PLFaultCat: A Product-Line Software Fault Tree Analysis Tool. Automated Software Engineering. Vol. 13. No. 1. pp. 169-193, Accepted, 2006.

P. Padmanabhan and R. Lutz. Tool-Supported Verification of Product-Line Requirements. Automated Software Engineering, Springer. Vol. 12. No. 4. pp. 447-485, 2005.

R. Lutz, S. Nelson, A. Patterson-Hine, C. Frost, D. Tal. Identifying contingency requirements using obstacle analysis. 13th IEEE Int'l Conf on Requirements Engineering, Paris, France, IEEE Computer Society. pp. 263-272, 2005.

R. Schwanke and R. Lutz. Experience with the Architectural Design of a Modest Product Family. Software Practice and Experience. Vol. 34. No. 13. pp. 1273-1296, 2004.

Robyn Lutz and Carmen Mikulski. Empirical Analysis of Safety-Critical Anomalies During Operations. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE, 2004.

R. Lutz and C. Mikulski. Requirements Discovery During the Testing of Safety-Critical Software. Proc. 25th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'03) , May 3-10, 2003, Portland, OR, 2003.

Robyn Lutz. Software Engineering for Safety: A Roadmap. in The Future of Software Engineering, ed. A. Finkelstein, ACM. pp. 213-224, 2000.