Using formal models to cross check an implementation

Abstract

International audienceInteractive systems are developed according to requirements, which may be, for instance, documentation, prototypes, diagrams, etc. The informal nature of system requirements may be a source of problems: it may be the case that a system does not implement the requirements as expected, thus, a way to validate whether an implementation follows the requirements is needed. We propose a novel approach to validating a system using formal models of the system. In this approach, a set of traces generated from the execution of the real interactive system is searched over the state space of the formal model. The scalability of the approach is demonstrated by an application to an industrial system in the nuclear plant domain. The combination of trace analysis and formal methods provides feedback that can bring improvements to both the real interactive system and the formal model

From LOTOS to LNT

“…• Distributed algorithms: verification and performance evaluation of mutual exclusion protocols 11 [79], verification of multiway synchronization protocols 12 [31,29,33], specification and rapid prototyping of Stanford's RAFT distributed consensus algorithm 13 [30,33], and performance evaluation of concurrent data structures 14 • Human-computer interaction: specification and validation of graphical user interfaces for a prototype control room of a nuclear power plant 19 [85] and of plastic user interfaces exploiting domain ontologies 20 [20] (Toulouse, France);…”

Formal development process of safety-critical embedded human machine interface systems

“…In [11], the authors proposed an approach to validate an implementation of HMI systems with respect to their informal requirements using the CADP toolbox. It describes a system using the formal language LNT and formalizes the expected properties using MCL.…”

“…Among the above design and verification solutions, the IVY workbench [7], ADEPT toolsets [8] and ICO framework [10] are focused on the formal modeling and verification of abstract design models, but do not address the correctness of the software implementation. The approach based on CADP toolbox [11] handles the compliance between formal model and implementation by simulation. The djnn framework [12] can facilitate the rapid prototyping and the verification of some properties based on static analysis.…”