31 research outputs found
Moving from Specifications to Contracts in Component-Based Design
Abstract. Program properties that are automatically inferred by static analysis tools are generally not considered to be completely trustworthy, unless the tool implementation or the results are formally verified. Here we focus on the formal verification of resource guarantees inferred by automatic cost analysis. Resource guarantees ensure that programs run within the indicated amount of resources which may refer to memory consumption, to number of instructions executed, etc. In previous work we studied formal verification of inferred resource guarantees that depend only on integer data. In realistic programs, however, resource consumption is often bounded by the size of heap-allocated data structures. Bounding their size requires to perform a number of structural heap analyses. The contributions of this paper are (i) to identify what exactly needs to be verified to guarantee sound analysis of heap manipulating programs, (ii) to provide a suitable extension of the program logic used for verification to handle structural heap properties in the context of resource guarantees, and (iii) to improve the underlying theorem prover so that proof obligations can be automatically discharged.
Contracts as specifications for dynamical systems in driving variable form
This paper introduces assume/guarantee contracts on continuous-time control
systems, hereby extending contract theories for discrete systems to certain new
model classes and specifications. Contracts are regarded as formal
characterizations of control specifications, providing an alternative to
specifications in terms of dissipativity properties or set-invariance. The
framework has the potential to capture a richer class of specifications more
suitable for complex engineering systems. The proposed contracts are supported
by results that enable the verification of contract implementation and the
comparison of contracts. These results are illustrated by an example of a
vehicle following system.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures; minor changes in the final version, as accepted
for publication in the Proceedings of the 2019 European Control Conference,
Naples, Ital
Structural Refinement for the Modal nu-Calculus
We introduce a new notion of structural refinement, a sound abstraction of
logical implication, for the modal nu-calculus. Using new translations between
the modal nu-calculus and disjunctive modal transition systems, we show that
these two specification formalisms are structurally equivalent.
Using our translations, we also transfer the structural operations of
composition and quotient from disjunctive modal transition systems to the modal
nu-calculus. This shows that the modal nu-calculus supports composition and
decomposition of specifications.Comment: Accepted at ICTAC 201
A Linear-Time Branching-Time Spectrum for Behavioral Specification Theories
We propose behavioral specification theories for most equivalences in the
linear-time--branching-time spectrum. Almost all previous work on specification
theories focuses on bisimilarity, but there is a clear interest in
specification theories for other preorders and equivalences. We show that
specification theories for preorders cannot exist and develop a general scheme
which allows us to define behavioral specification theories, based on
disjunctive modal transition systems, for most equivalences in the
linear-time--branching-time spectrum
Hennessy-Milner Logic with Greatest Fixed Points as a Complete Behavioural Specification Theory
There are two fundamentally different approaches to specifying and verifying
properties of systems. The logical approach makes use of specifications given
as formulae of temporal or modal logics and relies on efficient model checking
algorithms; the behavioural approach exploits various equivalence or refinement
checking methods, provided the specifications are given in the same formalism
as implementations.
In this paper we provide translations between the logical formalism of
Hennessy-Milner logic with greatest fixed points and the behavioural formalism
of disjunctive modal transition systems. We also introduce a new operation of
quotient for the above equivalent formalisms, which is adjoint to structural
composition and allows synthesis of missing specifications from partial
implementations. This is a substantial generalisation of the quotient for
deterministic modal transition systems defined in earlier papers
Safety Contracts for Timed ReactiveComponents in SysML
International audienceA variety of system design and architecture description languages, such as SysML, UML or AADL, allows the decomposition of complex system designs into communicating timed components. In this paper we consider the contract-based specification of such components. A contract is a pair formed of an assumption, which is an abstraction of the component’s environment, and a guarantee, which is an abstraction of the component’s behavior given that the environment behaves according to the assumption. Thus, a contract concentrates on a specific aspect of the component’s functionality and on a subset of its interface, which makes it relatively simpler to specify. Contracts may be used as an aid for hierarchical decomposition during design or for verification of properties of composites. This paper defines contracts for components formalized as a variant of timed input/output automata, introduces compositional results allowing to reason with contracts and shows how contracts can be used in a high-level modeling language (SysML) for specification and verification, based on an example extracted from a real-life system
A Robust Specification Theory for Modal Event-Clock Automata
In a series of recent work, we have introduced a general framework for
quantitative reasoning in specification theories. The contribution of this
paper is to show how this framework can be applied to yield a robust
specification theory for timed specifications.Comment: In Proceedings FIT 2012, arXiv:1207.348