Symbolic model checking of software product lines

Abstract

We study the problem of model checking software product line (SPL) behaviours against temporal properties. This is more difficult than for single systems because an SPL with n features yields up to 2 n individual systems to verify. As each individual verification suffers from state explosion, it is crucial to propose efficient formalisms and heuristics.We recently proposed featured transition systems (FTS), a compact representation for SPL behaviour, and defined algorithms for model checking FTS against linear temporal properties. Although they showed to outperform individual system verifications, they still face a state explosion problem as they enumerate and visit system states one by one.In this paper, we tackle this latter problem by using symbolic representations of the state space. This lead us to consider computation tree logic (CTL) which is supported by the industry-strength symbolic model checker NuSMV. We first lay the foundations for symbolic SPL model checking by defining a feature-oriented version of CTL and its dedicated algorithms. We then describe an implementation that adapts the NuSMV language and tool infrastructure. Finally, we propose theoretical and empirical evaluations of our results. The benchmarks show that for certain properties, our algorithm is over a hundred times faster than model checking each system with the standard algorithm.

Facilitating Reuse in Multi-goal Test-Suite Generation for Software Product Lines

“…Family-based SPL analysis approaches focus on lifting static analysis and model-checking techniques to entire product lines. Some of those approaches also use symbolic model-checking techniques, handling features as special inputs, as in our approach [14,16]. However, those approaches consider a family-based evaluation of one particular model-checking query without systematic reuse of analysis results.…”

“…Various promising attempts have been proposed, enhancing respective model-checking and software-testing techniques to efficiently verify entire families of software products instead of every single variant [4,12,14,16]. In practice, systematic software testing remains the most established and elaborated quality-assurance technique, as it is directly applicable to real-world applications at any level of abstraction [28].…”

Requirements analysis for a product family of DNA nanodevices

“…Lauenroth, Toehning, and Pohl modeled the behavior of SPLs with labeled automata, where the labels are the features of a particular product in the family, and used Computational Tree Logic (CTL) to describe properties to be model checked [38]. In a 2012 paper Cordy, Classen, Schobbens, Heymans and Legay built on their previous work [39] to symbolically model check SPLs efficiently [40]. They extended their Featured Transition Systems to handle SPLs that evolve over time.…”

A Model-Checking Tool for Families of Services

“…This results in a means to check that whenever a behavioural property is satisfied by an FTS modelling a product family, then it is also satisfied by every product of that family, and whenever a property is violated, then not only a counterexample is provided but also the products violating the property. In [8], this approach is improved by using symbolic model checking, examining sets of states at a time, and a feature-oriented version of CTL.…”