Verifying Service Continuity in a Dynamic Reconfiguration Procedure: Application to a Satellite System

Abstract

Abstract. The paper discusses the use of the TURTLE UML profile to model and verify service continuity during dynamic reconfiguration of embedded software, and space-based telecommunication software in particular. TURTLE extends UML class diagrams with composition operators, and activity diagrams with temporal operators. Translating TURTLE to the formal description technique RT-LOTOS gives the profile a formal semantics and makes it possible to reuse verification techniques implemented by the RTL, the RT-LOTOS toolkit developed at LAAS-CNRS. The paper proposes a modeling and formal validation methodology based on TURTLE and RTL, and discusses its application to a payload software application in charge of an embedded packet switch. The paper demonstrates the benefits of using TURTLE to prove service continuity for dynamic reconfiguration of embedded software.

New Operators for the TURTLE Real-Time UML Profile

“…The profile was successfully applied to various case studies, including an industrial application in the framework of the dynamic reconfiguration of software embedded on board satellites [2]. Fig.…”

“…The core of what we call "native TURTLE" includes four composition operators (Sequence, Parallel and Synchro, and Preemption). If these four operators enable description of various systems [2] [5], their application to complex mechanisms such as task scheduling remains fastidious. The designer's burden is important since he or she must describe the details of mechanisms that might advantageously be modeled by high-level and "compact" operators.…”

Verifying Runtime Reconfiguration Requirements on UML Models

“…In the literature, there are a number of approaches using UML models for specifying and verifying the reconfiguration of the software systems (Giese et al, 2004;Becker et al, 2006;Apvrille et al, 2004;Bucchiarone and Galeotti, 2008). For example, in the approach proposed in (Becker et al, 2006), the structure of the software system is modeled using a variant of UML class diagrams and the reconfiguration is simulated with application specific execution semantics.…”

Graph based verification of software evolution requirements

“…Model checking techniques provide a formal framework for verification of the dynamic properties of the system [35,77] and these techniques have been specialized for verifying reconfiguration requirements. With the proposed specialized techniques, one either has to remodel the system in the language of the model checker [60,76] or one has to model application-specific operational semantics [19,15,25]. Thus, in all approaches the verification requires additional artifacts (models or execution semantics) from the users.…”

“…Thus, in all approaches the verification requires additional artifacts (models or execution semantics) from the users. From these approaches, the references [60,15,19] provide verification on UML models where the UML meta-model elements are used for modeling component based architectures and formal execution semantics are provided for these models. However, the proposed semantics are not suitable for verification when the detailed OO design is completed.…”