Behavior modeling and automated verification of Web services

Cloud computing has been rapidly adopted over the last few years. However, techniques on Web services, one of the most important enabling technologies for cloud computing, are still not mature yet. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that supports dependable development of Web services. Our approach includes a new Web service model that separates service behaviors into operational and control behaviors. The coordination of operational and control behaviors at runtime is facilitated by conversational messages. We also propose an automated service verification approach based on symbolic model checking. In particular, our approach extracts the checking properties, in the form of temporal logic formulas, from control behaviors, and automatically verifies the properties in operational behaviors using the NuSMV model checker. The approach presented in this paper has been implemented using a number of state-of-the-art technologies. We conducted a number of experiments to study the performance of our proposed approach in detecting design problems in services. The results show that our automated approach can successfully detect service design problems. Our system offers a set of tools assisting service developers in specifying, debugging, and monitoring service behaviors. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Automated Mapping of UML Activity Diagrams to Formal Specifications for Supporting Containment Checking

Business analysts and domain experts are often sketching the behaviors of a software system using high-level models that are technology- and platform-independent. The developers will refine and enrich these high-level models with technical details. As a consequence, the refined models can deviate from the original models over time, especially when the two kinds of models evolve independently. In this context, we focus on behavior models; that is, we aim to ensure that the refined, low-level behavior models conform to the corresponding high-level behavior models. Based on existing formal verification techniques, we propose containment checking as a means to assess whether the system's behaviors described by the low-level models satisfy what has been specified in the high-level counterparts. One of the major obstacles is how to lessen the burden of creating formal specifications of the behavior models as well as consistency constraints, which is a tedious and error-prone task when done manually. Our approach presented in this paper aims at alleviating the aforementioned challenges by considering the behavior models as verification inputs and devising automated mappings of behavior models onto formal properties and descriptions that can be directly used by model checkers. We discuss various challenges in our approach and show the applicability of our approach in illustrative scenarios.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2014, arXiv:1404.043