Correctness by construction and style preserving reconfigurations of system of systems

Abstract

In distributed systems and dynamic environments, software architectures may evolve. A crucial issue when conducting system evolutions is to maintain the system in a consistent and functional state. As system complexity rises, manual checking or exhaustive model checking may be too time-and resource-consuming, lacking in scalability. This is particularly true with system of systems. Based on formal proofs in design-time, correctness by construction has recently emerged to efficiently guarantee system coherency. This article proposes a new method for the construction and specification of correct by construction system reconfigurations. Such transformations are characterized by graph rewriting rules that necessarily preserve the coherency of a system. We firstly propose operators on graph transformations and show that they conserve their correctness. Given a system specified by a graph grammar, these operators can be leveraged to construct correct transformations. We show in particular that any correct configuration can be reached starting from any other one without inconsistent intermediate step, using such transformations only.