Representing hierarchical state machine models in SMT-LIB

© ACM 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in MiSE '16: Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Modeling in Software Engineering https://doi.org/10.1145/2896982.2896990.We motivate and present a proposal for how to represent the syntax of behavioural models written in extended finite-state machine languages with hierarchical states (e.g., the Statecharts family) in SMT-LIB. By including the state structure explicitly in the SMT-LIB model, our goal is to facilitate effective automated deductive reasoning, which can exploit the structure found in the state hierarchy. We present a novel method that combines deep and shallow encoding techniques to describe models that have both state hierarchy and use the rich datatypes found in SMT-LIB. Our representation permits varying semantics to be chosen for the syntax recognizing the rich variety of semantics that exist for this family of modelling languages. We hope that discussion of these representation issues will facilitate model sharing for investigation of analysis techniques.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canad

DASH: A New Language for Declarative Behavioural Requirements with Control State Hierarchy

We present DASH, a new language for describing formal behavioural models of requirements. DASH combines the ability to write abstract, declarative transitions (as in Z or Alloy) with a labelled control state hierarchy (as in the Statecharts family of languages). The key contribution of DASH is the combination of explicit support for user-level abstractions that create and factor sets of transitions, such as state hierarchy, and the use of full first-order logic to describe the transitions

DASH: Declarative Modelling with Control State Hierarchy (Preliminary Version)

We present a new language, called DASH, for describing formal behavioural models. DASH combines common modelling constructs to describe abstractly both data and control in an integrated manner. DASH uses the Alloy language for describing data and its operations declaratively, and adds syntax for labelled control state hierarchy common in Statecharts descriptions of transition systems. In addition, DASH accommodates multiple factoring paradigms for modelling (control states, events, and conditions) and includes syntactic sugar (e.g., transition comprehension, transition templates) to write models that are concise and easy to understand. We describe the formal semantics of DASH, which carefully mix the usual semantic understanding of control state hierarchy with the declarative perspective, for creating abstract models early in system development. We implement these semantics in a translator from DASH to Alloy taking advantage of Alloy language features. We demonstrate DASH, our tool, and model checking analysis in the Alloy Analyzer using several case studies. The key novel insight of our work is in combining seamlessly common data and control modelling paradigms in a way that will be intuitive for those used to either paradigm, and enabling automatic analysis of the integrated model