From RT-LOTOS to Time Petri Nets new foundations for a verification platform

The formal description technique RT-LOTOS has been selected as intermediate language to add formality to a real-time UML profile named TURTLE. For this sake, an RT-LOTOS verification platform has been developed for early detection of design errors in real-time system models. The paper discusses an extension of the platform by inclusion of verification tools developed for Time Petri Nets. The starting point is the definition of RT-LOTOS to TPN translation patterns. In particular, we introduce the concept of components embedding Time Petri Nets. The translation patterns are implemented in a prototype tool which takes as input an RT-LOTOS specification and outputs a TPN in the format admitted by the TINA tool. The efficiency of the proposed solution has been demonstrated on various case studies

Rigorous Development of Composite Grid Services

CRESS (Communication Representation Employing Systematic Specification) is introduced as notation, a methodology and a toolset for service development. The article focuses on rigorous development of composite grid services, with particular emphasis on the principles behind the methodology. A straightforward graphical notation is used to describe grid services. These are then automatically specified, analysed and implemented. Analysis includes formal verification of desirable service properties, formal validation of test scenarios, testing of implementation functionality, and evaluation of implementation performance. The case study that illustrates the approach is document content analysis to compare two pieces of text. This involves two composite services supported by two partner services. The usability of the service design notation is assessed, and a comparison is made of the approach with similar ones. These show that the CRESS approach to developing services is usable and more complete than other comparable approaches

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

An Integrated Methodology for Creating Composed Web/Grid Services

This thesis presents an approach to design, specify, validate, verify, implement, and evaluate composed web/grid services. Web and grid services can be composed to create new services with complex behaviours. The BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) standard was created to enable the orchestration of web services, but there have also been investigation of its use for grid services. BPEL specifies the implementation of service composition but has no formal semantics; implementations are in practice checked by testing. Formal methods are used in general to define an abstract model of system behaviour that allows simulation and reasoning about properties. The approach can detect and reduce potentially costly errors at design time. CRESS (Communication Representation Employing Systematic Specification) is a domainindependent, graphical, abstract notation, and integrated toolset for developing composite web service. The original version of CRESS had automated support for formal specification in LOTOS (Language Of Temporal Ordering Specification), executing formal validation with MUSTARD (Multiple-Use Scenario Testing and Refusal Description), and implementing in BPEL4WS as the early version of BPEL standard. This thesis work has extended CRESS and its integrated tools to design, specify, validate, verify, implement, and evaluate composed web/grid services. The work has extended the CRESS notation to support a wider range of service compositions, and has applied it to grid services as a new domain. The thesis presents two new tools, CLOVE (CRESS Language-Oriented Verification Environment) and MINT (MUSTARD Interpreter), to respectively support formal verification and implementation testing. New work has also extended CRESS to automate implementation of composed services using the more recent BPEL standard WS-BPEL 2.0

Analysis and Verification of Service Interaction Protocols - A Brief Survey

Modeling and analysis of interactions among services is a crucial issue in Service-Oriented Computing. Composing Web services is a complicated task which requires techniques and tools to verify that the new system will behave correctly. In this paper, we first overview some formal models proposed in the literature to describe services. Second, we give a brief survey of verification techniques that can be used to analyse services and their interaction. Last, we focus on the realizability and conformance of choreographies.Comment: In Proceedings TAV-WEB 2010, arXiv:1009.330

Independent verification of specification models for large software systems at the early phases of development lifecycle

One of the major challenges facing the software industry, in general and IV&V (Independent Verification and Validation) analysts in particular, is to find ways for analyzing dynamic behavior of requirement specifications of large software systems early in the development lifecycle. Such analysis can significantly improve the performance and reliability of the developed systems. This dissertation addresses the problem of developing an IV&V framework for extracting semantics of dynamic behavior from requirement specifications based on: (1) SART (Structured Analysis with Realtime) models, and (2) UML (Unified Modeling Language) models.;For SART, the framework presented here shows a direct mapping from SART specification models to CPN (Colored Petrinets) models. The semantics of the SART hierarchy at the individual levels are preserved in the mapping. This makes it easy for the analyst to perform the analysis and trace back to the corresponding SART model. CPN was selected because it supports rigorous dynamic analysis. A large scale case study based on a component of NASA EOS system was performed for a proof of the concept.;For UML specifications, an approach based on metamodels is presented. A special type of metamodel, called dynamic metamodel (DMM), is introduced. This approach holds several advantages over the direct mapping of UML to CPN. The mapping rules for generating DMM are not CPN specific, hence they would not change if a language other than CPN is used. Also it makes it more flexible to develop DMM because other types of models can be added to the existing UML models. A simple example of a pacemaker is used to illustrate the concepts of DMM

From StoCharts to MoDeST: a comparative reliability analysis of train radio communications

StoCharts have been proposed as a UML statechart extension for performance and dependability evaluation, and have been applied in the context of train radio reliability assessment to show the principal tractability of realistic cases with this approach. In this paper, we extend on this bare feasibility result in two important directions. First, we sketch the cornerstones of a mechanizable translation of StoCharts to MoDeST. The latter is a process algebra-based formalism supported by the Motor/Möbius tool tandem. Second, we exploit this translation for a detailed analysis of the train radio case study