69,801 research outputs found
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Using formal methods to support testing
Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. While traditionally these approaches have been seen as rivals, in recent
years a new consensus has developed in which they are seen as complementary. This article reviews the state of the art regarding ways in which the presence of a formal specification can be used to assist testing
Automatic instantiation of abstract tests on specific configurations for large critical control systems
Computer-based control systems have grown in size, complexity, distribution
and criticality. In this paper a methodology is presented to perform an
abstract testing of such large control systems in an efficient way: an abstract
test is specified directly from system functional requirements and has to be
instantiated in more test runs to cover a specific configuration, comprising
any number of control entities (sensors, actuators and logic processes). Such a
process is usually performed by hand for each installation of the control
system, requiring a considerable time effort and being an error prone
verification activity. To automate a safe passage from abstract tests, related
to the so called generic software application, to any specific installation, an
algorithm is provided, starting from a reference architecture and a state-based
behavioural model of the control software. The presented approach has been
applied to a railway interlocking system, demonstrating its feasibility and
effectiveness in several years of testing experience
Transitioning Applications to Semantic Web Services: An Automated Formal Approach
Semantic Web Services have been recognized as a promising technology that exhibits huge commercial potential, and attract significant attention from both industry and the research community. Despite expectations being high, the industrial take-up of Semantic Web Service technologies has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that many systems have been developed without considering the potential of the web in integrating services and sharing resources. Without a systematic methodology and proper tool support, the migration from legacy systems to Semantic Web Service-based systems can be a very tedious and expensive process, which carries a definite risk of failure. There is an urgent need to provide strategies which allow the migration of legacy systems to Semantic Web Services platforms, and also tools to support such a strategy. In this paper we propose a methodology for transitioning these applications to Semantic Web Services by taking the advantage of rigorous mathematical methods. Our methodology allows users to migrate their applications to Semantic Web Services platform automatically or semi-automatically
A System for Deduction-based Formal Verification of Workflow-oriented Software Models
The work concerns formal verification of workflow-oriented software models
using deductive approach. The formal correctness of a model's behaviour is
considered. Manually building logical specifications, which are considered as a
set of temporal logic formulas, seems to be the significant obstacle for an
inexperienced user when applying the deductive approach. A system, and its
architecture, for the deduction-based verification of workflow-oriented models
is proposed. The process of inference is based on the semantic tableaux method
which has some advantages when compared to traditional deduction strategies.
The algorithm for an automatic generation of logical specifications is
proposed. The generation procedure is based on the predefined workflow patterns
for BPMN, which is a standard and dominant notation for the modeling of
business processes. The main idea for the approach is to consider patterns,
defined in terms of temporal logic,as a kind of (logical) primitives which
enable the transformation of models to temporal logic formulas constituting a
logical specification. Automation of the generation process is crucial for
bridging the gap between intuitiveness of the deductive reasoning and the
difficulty of its practical application in the case when logical specifications
are built manually. This approach has gone some way towards supporting,
hopefully enhancing our understanding of, the deduction-based formal
verification of workflow-oriented models.Comment: International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Scienc
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The use of sequencing information in software specification for verification
Software requirements specifications, virtual machine definitions, and algorithmic design all place constraints on the sequence of operations that are permissible during a program's execution. This paper discusses how these constraints can be captured and used to aid in the program verification process. The sequencing constraints can be expressed as a grammar over the alphabet of program operations. Several techniques can be used in support of testing or verification based on these specifications. Dynamic aalysis and static analysis are considered here. The automatic generation of some of these aids is feasible; the means of doing so is described
Specification Patterns for Robotic Missions
Mobile and general-purpose robots increasingly support our everyday life,
requiring dependable robotics control software. Creating such software mainly
amounts to implementing their complex behaviors known as missions. Recognizing
the need, a large number of domain-specific specification languages has been
proposed. These, in addition to traditional logical languages, allow the use of
formally specified missions for synthesis, verification, simulation, or guiding
the implementation. For instance, the logical language LTL is commonly used by
experts to specify missions, as an input for planners, which synthesize the
behavior a robot should have. Unfortunately, domain-specific languages are
usually tied to specific robot models, while logical languages such as LTL are
difficult to use by non-experts. We present a catalog of 22 mission
specification patterns for mobile robots, together with tooling for
instantiating, composing, and compiling the patterns to create mission
specifications. The patterns provide solutions for recurrent specification
problems, each of which detailing the usage intent, known uses, relationships
to other patterns, and---most importantly---a template mission specification in
temporal logic. Our tooling produces specifications expressed in the LTL and
CTL temporal logics to be used by planners, simulators, or model checkers. The
patterns originate from 245 realistic textual mission requirements extracted
from the robotics literature, and they are evaluated upon a total of 441
real-world mission requirements and 1251 mission specifications. Five of these
reflect scenarios we defined with two well-known industrial partners developing
human-size robots. We validated our patterns' correctness with simulators and
two real robots
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