Rigorous development of component-based systems using component metadata and patterns

Abstract

In previous work we presented a CSP-based systematic approach that fosters the rigorous design of component-based development (CBD). Our approach is strictly defined in terms of composition rules, which are the only permitted way to compose components. These rules guarantee the preservation of properties (particularly deadlock-freedom) by construction in component composition. Nevertheless, their application is allowed only under certain conditions whose verification via model checking turned out impracticable even for some simple designs, and particularly those involving cyclic topologies. In this paper, we address the performance of the analysis and present a significantly more efficient alternative to the verification of the rule side conditions, which are improved by carrying out partial verification on component metadata throughout component compositions and by using behavioural patterns. The use of metadata, together with behavioural patterns, demands new composition rules, which allow previous exponential time verifications to be carried out now in linear time. Two case studies (the classical dining philosophers, also used as a running example, and an industrial version of the leadership election algorithm) are presented to illustrate and validate the overall approach.

Verified simulation for robotics

“…The check of consistency can also flag the schedulability problem. The advantage of the deadlock check is that it is cheaper, and, for scalability, it can be easily automated with proof techniques or handled using techniques such as those in [33]. Moreover, if it fails, the source of the problem is clearly an issue with the RoboChart design, rather than any issue in the RoboSim model.…”

Efficient Verification of Concurrent Systems Using Synchronisation Analysis and SAT/SMT Solving

“…Many approximate techniques have harnessed local analysis to verify systems in several contexts and using different types of concurrency [7,8,10,11,52,57,62]. They are all built, to some extent, around the fundamental principle: under reasonable assumptions about the system, a cycle of ungranted requests is a necessary condition for a deadlock.…”

“…This methodology's focus on the system modelling phase makes it a natural target for formal verification, which is used to ensure properties of system models [45,77]. There are examples of the integration fully-automated verification frameworks for the analysis of UML and SysML diagrams [32,36,43,[54][55][56], component-based systems [15,38,62], and robotic systems [26,59]; many of these frameworks are based around formalisms similar to ours, so they could directly benefit from the techniques presented in this work.…”

A Research Landscape on Formal Verification of Software Architecture Descriptions

“…This makes such a technique to be a prohibitive choice in many cases due to unneglectable execution time, computational resources, and effort from architects, important reasons that often hinder the adoption of formal-based techniques in industry [5]. Aiming at overcoming these limitations, alternative techniques such as assume-guarantee model-checking [20], compositional model-checking [21], [22], parallel model-checking [23], statistical model checking [24], and probabilistic model checking [25] have been proposed in the last years concerning affordable, computationally efficient approaches to rigorously verify properties of general specification. Despite our study did not have a specific research question about scalability issues on formal verification approaches for software architecture descriptions, this was a point that called our attention since our findings revealed a major use of model checking (77% of the selected studies).…”