Mind the Gap: Addressing Behavioural Inconsistencies with Formal Methods

Juliana K. F. Bowles, Marco B. Caminati
2016 2016 23rd Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)  
In complex system design, it is important to construct several design models focusing on different aspects of a system to gain a better understanding of individual component structure and behaviour. Scenarios of execution are commonly used to specify partial behaviour and interactions between a group of system objects or components. However, partial specifications may hide inconsistencies or an otherwise unintentionally incomplete or underspecified behavioural model. This paper proposes a new
more » ... werful technique combining constraint solvers and theorem provers to complete partial specifications and determine overall model inconsistencies. We use a trueconcurrent model, namely labelled event structures, which can be used as the underlying semantics of widely used workflow or scenario-based languages. We show how an interplay between the theorem prover Isabelle and constraint solver Z3 can be used for detecting and solving partial specifications and inconsistencies over event structures.
doi:10.1109/apsec.2016.051 dblp:conf/apsec/BowlesC16 fatcat:owti7znvsngatbvhrmiecmqe4q