An Imperative Extension to Alloy

Near, Joseph P.; Jackson, Daniel

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-11811-1_10

Cited by 17 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Nonetheless, such ad hoc specification is error-prone and verbose, and forces the developer to be concerned with particularities of the idiom rather than with the properties that he actually wishes to verify, and as a consequence regular Alloy is not well-suited to address R4. To overcome this limitation, considerable research has been dedicated to enhance Alloy with dynamic behavior [11,5,18,25,8]. The main drawback of these approaches is that they compromise the flexibility that the Alloy users are accustomed to, introducing syntactic extensions that force them to adhere to specific idioms, and consequently breaking the R3 requirement.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although expressible in regular Alloy (via said idioms), verifying such properties with the Analyzer requires some insightfulness and care from the user, to avoid the spurious counter-examples that usually occur with a naive encoding of the bounded model-checking technique [25,8]. The technique from [18] enhances Alloy with imperative constructs, again undermining R3. In contrast, the technique proposed in [5] extends the relational logic of Alloy with CTL temporal logic.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, it disregards the rich structural properties introduced by the signature type system from regular Alloy, undermining its ability to address R2. Finally, even though all these works attempt to enhance Alloy with dynamic properties, besides [18] that distinguishes between static and variable fields, none properly address R1, since they do not distinguish between the system configuration and the dynamic components that evolve over time.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Lightweight specification and analysis of dynamic systems with rich configurations

Macedo

Brunel

Chemouil

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

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Model-checking is increasingly popular in the early phases of the software development process. To establish the correctness of a software design one must usually verify both structural and behavioral (or temporal) properties. Unfortunately, most specification languages, and accompanying model-checkers, excel only in analyzing either one or the other kind. This limits their ability to verify dynamic systems with rich configurations: systems whose state space is characterized by rich structural properties, but whose evolution is also expected to satisfy certain temporal properties. To address this problem, we first propose Electrum, an extension of the Alloy specification language with temporal logic operators, where both rich configurations and expressive temporal properties can easily be defined. Two alternative model-checking techniques are then proposed, one bounded and the other unbounded, to verify systems expressed in this language, namely to verify that every desirable temporal property holds for every possible configuration. CCS Concepts •Software and its engineering → Specification languages; Model checking;

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Lightweight specification and analysis of dynamic systems with rich configurations

Macedo

Brunel

Chemouil

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…In this work we restrict ourselves to declarative constructs, disregarding imperative ones (known 1 http://www.eclipse.org/atl/ in ATL as called rules and do blocks). Giving semantics to imperative constructs in Alloy's relational logic is doable (see, for example, [38]), but the need to explicitly represent all intermediate updates to the models in execution traces would deem our solver based approach completely unfeasible, in particular in presence of loops.…”

Section: Atl Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Least-change bidirectional model transformation with QVT-R and ATL

Macedo

Cunha

2014

Softw Syst Model

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QVT Relations (QVT-R) is the standard language proposed by the OMG to specify bidirectional model transformations. Unfortunately, in part due to ambiguities and omissions in the original semantics, acceptance and development of effective tool support has been slow. Recently, the checking semantics of QVT-R has been clarified and formalized. In this article we propose a QVT-R tool that complies to such semantics. Unlike any other existing tool, it also supports metamodels enriched with OCL constraints (thus avoiding returning ill-formed models), and proposes an alternative enforcement semantics that works according to the simple and predictable "principle of least change". The implementation is based on an embedding of both QVT-R transformations and UML class diagrams (annotated with OCL) in Alloy, a lightweight formal specification language with support for automatic model finding via SAT solving. We also show how this technique can be applied to bidirectionalize ATL, a popular (but unidirectional) model transformation language.

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“…Imperative Alloy (Near and Jackson 2010) is a syntactic extension to the Alloy language for specifying dynamic systems. However, neither idiom provides good support for the composition of dynamic behaviours, and, since both idioms represent ad hoc solutions, specifications written by different authors may differ sufficiently to reduce readability.…”

Section: Adding Imperative Constructs To Alloymentioning

confidence: 99%

Applications and extensions of Alloy: past, present and future

Torlak

Taghdiri²,

Dennis³

et al. 2013

Math. Struct. Comp. Sci.

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Alloy is a declarative language for lightweight modelling and analysis of software. The core of the language is based on first-order relational logic, which offers an attractive balance between analysability and expressiveness. The logic is expressive enough to capture the intricacies of real systems, but is also simple enough to support fully automated analysis with the Alloy Analyzer. The Analyzer is built on a SAT-based constraint solver and provides automated simulation, checking and debugging of Alloy specifications. Because of its automated analysis and expressive logic, Alloy has been applied in a wide variety of domains. These applications have motivated a number of extensions both to the Alloy language and to its SAT-based analysis. This paper provides an overview of Alloy in the context of its three largest application domains, lightweight modelling, bounded code verification and test-case generation, and three recent application-driven extensions, an imperative extension to the language, a compiler to executable code and a proof-capable analyser based on SMT. Near 916 desired property by searching for a counterexample to that property; and, finally, it can help debug an overconstrained specification by highlighting any constraints that conflict with one another. All three analyses are performed by reducing Alloy to relational logic, and solving the resulting constraints with Kodkod (Torlak 2009), which is an efficient, SAT-based solver for relational satisfiability problems. Kodkod works by translating a relational problem to a set of equisatisfiable boolean clauses, which are decided by an off-the-shelf SAT solver. The SAT solver is pluggable, ensuring that both Kodkod and Alloy users automatically benefit from the continuing advances in SAT solving technology. The versatility of Alloy, coupled with the fully automated analysis, has motivated its use in a wide range of practical and exploratory applications. Examples include:design modelling and analysis (Kang and Jackson 2009; Ramananandro 2008); bounded program verification (Dennis et al.

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An Imperative Extension to Alloy

Cited by 17 publications

References 16 publications

Lightweight specification and analysis of dynamic systems with rich configurations

Lightweight specification and analysis of dynamic systems with rich configurations

Least-change bidirectional model transformation with QVT-R and ATL

Applications and extensions of Alloy: past, present and future

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