Software monitoring through formal specification animation

Abstract

This paper presents a formal specification-based software monitoring approach that can dynamically and continuously monitor the behaviors of a target system and explicitly recognize undesirable behaviors in the implementation with respect to its formal specification. The key idea of our approach is in building a monitoring module that connects a specification animator with a program debugger. The requirements information about expected dynamic behaviors of the target system are gathered from the formal specification animator, while the actual behaviors of concrete implementations of the target system are obtained through the program debugger. Based on the information obtained from both sides, the judgement on the conformance of the concrete implementation with respect to the formal specification is made timely while the target system is running. Furthermore, the proposed formal specification-based software monitoring technique does not embed any instrumentation codes to the target system nor does it annotate the target system with any formal specifications. It can detect implementation errors in a real-time manner, and help the developers and users of the system to react to the problems before critical failure occurs.

CoMA: Conformance Monitoring of Java Programs by Abstract State Machines

“…In order to assess the viability of our approach, we have taken several examples in literature and checked whether we were able to apply our approach to existing runtime case studies, including the Railroad Gate [9], the Initialization Fiasco problem [5], a robotic assembly system [19], the Knight's Tour problem [20]. We have written the Java code, if not available, and their ASM specifications (see [2] for details).…”

“…A comparison with [19] is not possible. They use, like CoMA, interpretation of formal specifications, but their tool is not available and no time data are published.…”

“…Our work has been inspired by the work presented in [19], in which the authors describe a formal specification-based software monitoring system. In their system they check that the behavior of a concrete implementation (a Java code) complies with its formal specification (a Z model).…”

“…Examples of operational specifications are abstract automata and state machines. In [19], for instance, the specification is given in the Z language and it describes the system state and the ways in which it changes.…”

Offline Model-Based Testing and Runtime Monitoring of the Sensor Voting Module

“…In order to describe the expected correctness properties, several formalisms have been used in literature as, for example, temporal logics [12,6], extended regular expressions [8], and Z specifications [15].…”