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A feature-based classification of formal verification techniques for software models

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Abstract

Software models are the core development artifact in model-based engineering (MBE). The MBE paradigm promotes the use of software models to describe structure and behavior of the system under development and proposes the automatic generation of executable code from the models. Thus, defects in the models most likely propagate to executable code. To detect defects already at the modeling level, many approaches propose to use formal verification techniques to ensure the correctness of these models. These approaches are the subject of this survey. We review the state of the art of formal verification techniques for software models and provide a feature-based classification that allows us to categorize and compare the different approaches.

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Notes

  1. Note that there exist two classification schemes, namely the safety-liveness [1] and the safety-progress classification [29].

  2. Weak bisimulation allows internal steps for which no corresponding step in the opposite system may exist.

  3. In general, a constraint or assertion c over a transition system with initial state \(\iota \) and transition relation T is said to be inductive if \(\iota \Rightarrow c\) (base case) and \(c \wedge T \Rightarrow c'\) (induction step) holds where \(c'\) denotes the constraint in the next state.

  4. The source files for Isabelle/HOL are available from http://www.irit.fr/~Martin.Strecker/Publications/proofs_graph_transformations.tgz.

  5. With version 4.5.2 of Groove (build: 20120606174037), the verification requires 13413.8ms on an Intel Core i5 2.67Ghz with 8GB of RAM running Gentoo Linux with OpenJDK 1.6. Taking into consideration that Groove was in its infancy when the comparison was performed in 2004, this improved result reflects the development efforts of past years. In contrast, SPIN, the verification back-end of CheckVML has been under active development since the 1980s [12]. However, we cannot provide up-to-date runtimes for CheckVML as it is currently not available to the public.

  6. Available from http://groove.sourceforge.com.

  7. Available from https://www.eclipse.org/henshin/downloads.php.

  8. Available from http://www.ti.inf.uni-due.de/research/tools/augur2/.

  9. A MEL theory is deterministic if its equations, interpreted from left to right, are confluent and terminating such that every term can be rewritten into a unique normal form.

  10. For an introduction to term rewriting refer to [6] and [14].

  11. For an RWL theory to be executable as a system module has to be coherent [35, p. 136].

  12. Available from ftp://moment.dsic.upv.es/releases/20070727/.

  13. Unfortunately, SOCLe does not seem to be available to the public anymore.

  14. Available from http://www.modelevolution.org/prototypes/mococl.

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Acknowledgements

We want to thank the participants of the Volt 2013 workshop for valuable discussions and suggestions of improvement on an initial version of this work; in particular, Moussa Amrani, Leen Lambers, Tihamer Levendovszky, and Manuel Wimmer (in alphabetic order) as well as the anonymous reviewers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Sebastian Gabmeyer

  2. University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Martin Gogolla

  3. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Petra Kaufmann & Gerti Kappel

  4. Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria

    Martina Seidl

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  1. Sebastian Gabmeyer
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  2. Petra Kaufmann
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  3. Martina Seidl
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  4. Martin Gogolla
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Correspondence to Sebastian Gabmeyer.

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Communicated by Dr. Benoit Baudry.

This work has been funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) under Grant ICT10-018 and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under Grant S11408-N23.

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Gabmeyer, S., Kaufmann, P., Seidl, M. et al. A feature-based classification of formal verification techniques for software models. Softw Syst Model 18, 473–498 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-017-0591-z

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