Compatibility Checking for Asynchronously Communicating Software

International audienceCompatibility is a crucial problem that is encountered while constructing new software by reusing and composing existing components. A set of software components is called compatible if their composition preserves certain properties, such as deadlock freedom. However, checking compatibility for systems communicating asynchronously is an undecidable problem, and asynchronous communication is a common interaction mechanism used in building software systems. A typical approach in analyzing such systems is to bound the state space. In this paper, we take a different approach and do not impose any bounds on the number of participants or the sizes of the message buffers. Instead, we present a sufficient condition for checking compatibility of a set of asynchronously communicating components. Our approach relies on the synchronizability property which identifies systems for which interaction behavior remains the same when asynchronous communication is replaced with synchronous communication. Using the synchronizability property, we can check the compatibility of systems with unbounded message buffers by analyzing only a finite part of their behavior. We have implemented a prototype tool to automate our approach and we have applied it to many examples

Verification of Well-formedness in Message-Passing Asynchronous Systems modeled as Communicating Finite-State Machines

Asynchronous systems with message-passing communication paradigm have made major inroads in many application domains in service-oriented computing, secure and safe operating systems and in general, distributed systems. Asynchrony and concurrency in these systems bring in new challenges in verification of correctness properties. In particular, the high-level behavior of message-passing asynchronous systems is modeled as communicating finite-state machines (CFSMs) with unbounded communication buffers/channels. It has been proven that, in general, state-space exploration based automatic verification of CFSMs is undecidable - specifically, reachability and boundedness problems for CFSMs are undecidable. In this context, we focus on an important path-based property for CFSMs, namely well-formedness - every message sent can be eventually consumed. We show that well-formedness is undecidable as well, and present decidable sub-classes for which verification of well-formedness can be automated. We implemented the algorithm for verifying the well-formedness for the decidable subclass, and present our results using several case studies such as service choreographies and Singularity OS contracts

Author manuscript, published in "FACS 2013, Nanchang: China (2013)" Compatibility Checking for Asynchronously Communicating Software

Abstract. Compatibility is a crucial problem that is encountered while constructing new software by reusing and composing existing components. A set of software components is called compatible if their composition preserves certain properties, such as deadlock freedom. However, checking compatibility for systems communicating asynchronously is an undecidable problem, and asynchronous communication is a common interaction mechanism used in building software systems. A typical approach in analyzing such systems is to bound the state space. In this paper, we take a different approach and do not impose any bounds on the number of participants or the sizes of the message buffers. Instead, we present a sufficient condition for checking compatibility of a set of asynchronously communicating components. Our approach relies on the synchronizability property which identifies systems for which interaction behavior remains the same when asynchronous communication is replaced with synchronous communication. Using the synchronizability property, we can check the compatibility of systems with unbounded message buffers by analyzing only a finite part of their behavior. We have implemented a prototype tool to automate our approach and we have applied it to many examples.