The AltaRica Association
The AltaRica Association
AltaRica Wizard is an integrated modeling environment dedicated to probabilistic risk and safety analyses of complex technical systems. AltaRica Wizard supports two modeling languages: AltaRica 3.0 and S2ML+SBE. Both languages belong to the S2ML+X family .
AltaRica Wizard provides most of the expected functionalities of a code editor: syntax highlighting, management of copy and paste, line numbering and so on. AltaRica Wizard manages models into projects. Projects gather the different source files of a model, as well as some files generated for or by assessment tools.
In addition to model edition functionalities, the current version of AltaRica Wizard embeds three tool chains to assess AltaRica 3.0 models:
These assessment tools are developed independently of AltaRica Wizard, partly by members of the AltaRica Association and partly in the framework of the Open-AltaRica project.
From a development standpoint, AltaRica Wizard is completely separated from the above mentioned assessment tools and comes on top of them, exchanging information with them via their standard (textual) interface.
In addition, since its version 1.3.0, AltaRica Wizard embeds XFTA and provided an integrated interface to design XFTA scripts.
The AltaRica 3.0 project started in 2011 at École Polytechnique. I had at that time a researcher position at CNRS and a professor position at École Polytechnique. École Polytechnique provided a PhD grant to Tatiana Prosvirnova to work on the design of the language and its compilation into fault trees. The DGA sponsored a one year post-doctoral position of Michel Batteux who worked on the prototype of the stochastic simulator.
The project took off with Open-AltaRica project hosted at IRT SystemX and sponsored by Apsys-Airbus, SAFRAN, and Thales. Michel Batteux was the manager of the project. I moved in between from École Polytechnique to École Centrale Paris, now CentraleSupélec, to take the head of the chair Blériot-Fabre sponsored by SAFRAN. Tatiana Prosvirnova got a one-year post-doctoral position from the chair to develop further AltaRica tools and the SmartSync platform for the synchronization of heterogeneous models.
The project is now hosted by the non-profit AltaRica Association we created to host the intellectual property of the tools, as well as to distribute them.
I started the development of AltaRica Wizard as an independent and personal contribution to the Open-AltaRica project. I go on developing this environment as part of my research activities at NTNU.
The development of AltaRica tools is a collective work. Mathematical and algorithmic foundations are designed in common with Tatiana Prosvirnova (now working at ONERA) and Michel Batteux. Tatiana and Michel are doing a fantastic job, on their free time for the most part, implementing and maintaining concretely the tools. Benjamin Aupetit developed the first version of the stochastic simulator in the framework of his PhD at IRT SystemX.
The current version of AltaRica Wizard is version 1.4.1.
First Warning: On Windows, XFTA is compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 2019. You may need to install the Microsoft redistributable libraries to make it run (typically is you get the message "No xfta DLL"). Microsoft provides an installer for these libraries: VC_redist.x64.exe.
Alternatively (and may be preferably) you can find this installer on Visual Studio download web pages. For security reasons, you should download these libraries only from Microsoft websites.
Second Warning:
For some strange reasons, Windows refuses sometimes to install the library "libwinpthread-1.dll".
If the AltaRica tools do not work, it is probably for this reason.
You can check and fix the problem by installing this library on your computer in the "tools" sub-folder of
AltaRica Wizard installation folder,
i.e. by default "C:\Users\JohnDoo\AppData\Roaming\AltaRica Association\AltaRicaWizard\tools",
assuming your user name is "JohnDoo".
You can get here a zip archive containing this library.
Just extract the library from the archive and make sure it is now directly in the folder "tools"
(not in a sub-folder).
AltaRica Wizard is developed using the Qt6 framework by the Qt Company. This choice has some legal consequences the user should know and accept.
AltaRica Wizard is free of use for non-commercial purposes. This program is distributed as is in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty of any kind; without even the implied warranty of design, merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Assessment tools called by AltaRica Wizard are the copyrights of their respective owners. The user is invited to check that he or she has all rights to use these tools for the purpose he or she uses them.
As of today and as permitted by the LGLPv3 license of Qt6 (see Qt licensing terms), AltaRica Wizard is not an open source tool. This situation will last until the AltaRica Association has established with its partners the economical model of AltaRica tools. The mid-term objective is to have a dual licensing model, just as the Qt framework.