Modelling Complex Timing Requirements with Refinement

Sulskus, Gintautas; Poppleton, Michael; Rezazadeh, Abdolbaghi

doi:10.1109/iri.2016.23

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Traditional program synthesis using test cases synthesises programs, and is difficult. Alternatively, our research synthesises design models, from which refinement techniques 42 can be used to implement programs.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic refactoring of conditions and substitutions for B state transition models

Cai,

Sun,

Dobbie

2023

Softw Pract Exp

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SummaryThe automation of programming, which lies at the intersection of software engineering and artificial intelligence, enables machines to automatically generate programs that satisfy given requirements. In the context of B formal design modeling, one of the challenges is the refactoring of substitutions in design specifications, which often uses state transitions to describe how program or system statuses change during execution. This paper proposes a condition and substitution refactoring algorithm for the B formal specification language. The aim of the work is to automatically derive B operational predicates based on given transitions. The work has been extremely useful to machine‐driven formal design model repair as well as automated design specification generation. Given a set of state transitions, common relations of their state variables can be discovered and clustered into a number of classes. These relations can be further used to synthesize substitutions that derive new states from existing states. To restrict application domains of the synthesized substitutions, conditions that guard these substitutions are generated using first‐order logic. We have implemented the proposed algorithm as an extension to the ProB model checker. Experiments were conducted based on the B model public dataset. The evaluation results demonstrated that our solution is able to synthesize conditions and substitutions for various sets of state transitions in a wide range of B models.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic refactoring of conditions and substitutions for B state transition models

Cai,

Sun,

Dobbie

2023

Softw Pract Exp

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“…Event-B is a formal method that is usually used for systemlevel modelling and analysis with refinement and reasoning on the model [8]. However, it lacks explicit support for expressing and verifying timing constraints [9]. Cansell et al developed an action-reaction pattern to model the causal order between events.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Butler and Falampin proposed an approach to modeling and refining timing properties in classical B, which adds a clock variable representing the current time and an operation which advances the clock [11]. Based on this approach, Sarshogh and Sulskus added explicit support for trigger-response properties with deadline, delay, expiry and interval timing properties [9], [12]. However these developments have failed to incorporate a proper treatment of critical issues in timed systems, namely, the divergence of intermediate events and infeasible responses caused by a lack of progress or conflicting timing constraints.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reasoning About Real-Time Systems in Event-B Models with Fairness Assumptions

Zhu

Butler

Cîrstea

et al. 2021

2021 International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering (TASE)

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Stepwise-based development supported by the Event-B formalism has been used in the domain of system design and verification. This refinement approach guarantees that safety properties are preserved, while additional reasoning is required to prove liveness properties. Our previous work proposes to use real-time trigger-response properties to reason about liveness properties and timed properties in real-time systems. Conditions such as weak fairness assumptions, relative deadlock freedom, and conditional convergence are explored to eliminate Zeno behavior when modeling real-time systems. In this reasoning framework, the response events are required not to be disabled by other events. This paper extends our previous results by using strong fairness assumptions to relax the constraints on response events. Refinement rules and strategies are also developed to refine real-time systems in the form of trace semantics and LTL operators with fairness assumptions. A simplified bounded re-transmission protocol case study is used to illustrate the approach.

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“…Sarshogh's approach only handles the system with trigger and response pattern without specifying some possible interrupt events from the environment. Sulskus et al extended their work by constructing a set of refinement transformations with Event-B code templates to verify and validate interval timing properties [27]. Their work provides soundproof to refine abstract time intervals to alternative or sequent sub-time intervals.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formalizing hierarchical scheduling for refinement of real-time systems

Zhu¹,

Butler²,

Cîrstea³

2020

Science of Computer Programming

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The Event-B formalism offers a stepwise development approach for managing complexity in system design. However, the existing work that extends Event-B models with discrete timing properties inadequately represents the communication and competition between concurrent tasks in concurrent systems. In this paper, we present the semantics of the parameterized real-time trigger-response properties of Event-B models based on timing invariants. We show a method of syntactically encoding parameterized real-time trigger-response properties in Event-B machines. To capture the concurrency between tasks, we distinguish end-to-end timing properties and scheduler-based timing properties from the perspective of different system design phases. We model end-to-end timing properties as parameterized timing properties and scheduler-based timing properties as unparameterized timing properties. A nondeterministic queue-based scheduling framework is proposed to replace end-to-end timing properties with scheduler-based timing properties. Additional gluing invariants are provided for this refinement. To demonstrate the usability of the framework, we formalize a two-level hierarchical scheduling system with local resource sharing managed by a time-division multiplexing global scheduler and two alternative local schedulers refined by the nondeterministic queue-based scheduling policy. Models are proved using the Rodin tool.

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Modelling Complex Timing Requirements with Refinement

Cited by 4 publications

References 12 publications

Automatic refactoring of conditions and substitutions for B state transition models

Automatic refactoring of conditions and substitutions for B state transition models

Reasoning About Real-Time Systems in Event-B Models with Fairness Assumptions

Formalizing hierarchical scheduling for refinement of real-time systems

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