A prime topic of the R&D activities of PST is the development of methods to improve software quality. The key thereto is the integration of currently used semiformal engineering methods and notations, such as UML, with formal methods in order to provide a basis for mathematical analysis, validation, maintenance and verification of requirements, design specifications and software systems. A second central theme is the development of new techniques for object-oriented, constraint based, functional programming. This includes the study of foundational aspects of programming languages, such as semantics, correctness, specification construction, and design and development calculi as well as the application of these methods and principles to the design and implementation of software systems.
Actual application areas are concurrent and distributed programming, internet programming and multimedia systems. PST has particular competence in object-oriented software development, in Java programming and the design of web based software systems. PST researchers have developed the first formal semantics for multi-threading in Java and the first provably correct code generation algorithm, generating concurrent Java programs from UML designs. Moreover, Java is used in teaching and software development for several advanced client/server architectures and the implementation of e-commerce agents. Other products of PST are an adaptive hypermedia training system, a workflow driven CASE tool for software engineering, a semantic meta editor for diagrammatic languages and the language EPKML for high level design and rapid development of electronic product catalogues.
Currently, PST runs 7 sponsored research projects on formal foundations of object-oriented software engineering, web and hypermedia engineering, software development for distributed and mobile systems, test generation from design, integration of Java with constraint programming, and the development of a distributed web-based decision support for global change of climate.