14,241 research outputs found
Quantitative Verification: Formal Guarantees for Timeliness, Reliability and Performance
Computerised systems appear in almost all aspects of our daily lives, often in safety-critical scenarios such as embedded control systems in cars and aircraft
or medical devices such as pacemakers and sensors. We are thus increasingly reliant on these systems working correctly, despite often operating in unpredictable or unreliable environments. Designers of such devices need ways to guarantee that they will operate in a reliable and efficient manner.
Quantitative verification is a technique for analysing quantitative aspects of a system's design, such as timeliness, reliability or performance. It applies formal methods, based on a rigorous analysis of a mathematical model of the system, to automatically prove certain precisely specified properties, e.g. ``the airbag will always deploy within 20 milliseconds after a crash'' or ``the probability of both sensors failing simultaneously is less than 0.001''.
The ability to formally guarantee quantitative properties of this kind is beneficial across a wide range of application domains. For example, in safety-critical systems, it may be essential to establish credible bounds on the probability with which certain failures or combinations of failures can occur. In embedded control systems, it is often important to comply with strict constraints on timing or resources. More generally, being able to derive guarantees on precisely specified levels of performance or efficiency is a valuable tool in the design of, for example, wireless networking protocols, robotic systems or power management algorithms, to name but a few.
This report gives a short introduction to quantitative verification, focusing in particular on a widely used technique called model checking, and its generalisation to the analysis of quantitative aspects of a system such as timing, probabilistic behaviour or resource usage.
The intended audience is industrial designers and developers of systems such as those highlighted above who could benefit from the application of quantitative verification,but lack expertise in formal verification or modelling
COST Action IC 1402 ArVI: Runtime Verification Beyond Monitoring -- Activity Report of Working Group 1
This report presents the activities of the first working group of the COST
Action ArVI, Runtime Verification beyond Monitoring. The report aims to provide
an overview of some of the major core aspects involved in Runtime Verification.
Runtime Verification is the field of research dedicated to the analysis of
system executions. It is often seen as a discipline that studies how a system
run satisfies or violates correctness properties. The report exposes a taxonomy
of Runtime Verification (RV) presenting the terminology involved with the main
concepts of the field. The report also develops the concept of instrumentation,
the various ways to instrument systems, and the fundamental role of
instrumentation in designing an RV framework. We also discuss how RV interplays
with other verification techniques such as model-checking, deductive
verification, model learning, testing, and runtime assertion checking. Finally,
we propose challenges in monitoring quantitative and statistical data beyond
detecting property violation
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Model Driven Mutation Applied to Adaptative Systems Testing
Dynamically Adaptive Systems modify their behav- ior and structure in
response to changes in their surrounding environment and according to an
adaptation logic. Critical sys- tems increasingly incorporate dynamic
adaptation capabilities; examples include disaster relief and space exploration
systems. In this paper, we focus on mutation testing of the adaptation logic.
We propose a fault model for adaptation logics that classifies faults into
environmental completeness and adaptation correct- ness. Since there are
several adaptation logic languages relying on the same underlying concepts, the
fault model is expressed independently from specific adaptation languages.
Taking benefit from model-driven engineering technology, we express these
common concepts in a metamodel and define the operational semantics of mutation
operators at this level. Mutation is applied on model elements and model
transformations are used to propagate these changes to a given adaptation
policy in the chosen formalism. Preliminary results on an adaptive web server
highlight the difficulty of killing mutants for adaptive systems, and thus the
difficulty of generating efficient tests.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and
Validation, Mutation Analysis Workshop (Mutation 2011), Berlin : Allemagne
(2011
Quality-aware model-driven service engineering
Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Quality aspects
ranging from interoperability to maintainability to performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Architecture models can substantially influence quality attributes of the implemented software systems. Besides the benefits of explicit architectures on maintainability and reuse, architectural constraints such as styles, reference architectures and architectural patterns can influence observable software properties such as performance. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and evaluating the performance of implemented software. We present an approach for addressing the quality of services and service-based systems at the model-level in the context of model-driven service engineering. The focus on architecture-level models is a consequence of the black-box
character of services
Specification and Verification of Context-dependent Services
Current approaches for the discovery, specification, and provision of
services ignore the relationship between the service contract and the
conditions in which the service can guarantee its contract. Moreover, they do
not use formal methods for specifying services, contracts, and compositions.
Without a formal basis it is not possible to justify through formal
verification the correctness conditions for service compositions and the
satisfaction of contractual obligations in service provisions. We remedy this
situation in this paper. We present a formal definition of services with
context-dependent contracts. We define a composition theory of services with
context-dependent contracts taking into consideration functional,
nonfunctional, legal and contextual information. Finally, we present a formal
verification approach that transforms the formal specification of service
composition into extended timed automata that can be verified using the model
checking tool UPPAAL.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2011, arXiv:1108.208
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