Specification and Model-driven Trace Checking of Complex Temporal Properties

Offline trace checking is a procedure used to evaluate requirement properties over a trace of recorded events. System properties verified in the context of trace checking can be specified using different specification languages and formalisms; in this thesis, we consider two classes of complex temporal properties: 1) properties defined using aggregation operators; 2) signal-based temporal properties from the Cyber Physical System (CPS) domain. The overall goal of this dissertation is to develop methods and tools for the specification and trace checking of the aforementioned classes of temporal properties, focusing on the development of scalable trace checking procedures for such properties. The main contributions of this thesis are: i) the TEMPSY-CHECK-AG model-driven approach for trace checking of temporal properties with aggregation operators, defined in the TemPsy-AG language; ii) a taxonomy covering the most common types of Signal-based Temporal Properties (SBTPs) in the CPS domain; iii) SB-TemPsy, a trace-checking approach for SBTPs that strikes a good balance in industrial contexts in terms of efficiency of the trace checking procedure and coverage of the most important types of properties in CPS domains. SB-TemPsy includes: 1) SB-TemPsy-DSL, a DSL that allows the specification of the types of SBTPs identified in the aforementioned taxonomy, and 2) an efficient trace-checking procedure, implemented in a prototype tool called SB-TemPsy-Check; iv) TD-SB-TemPsy-Report, a model-driven trace diagnostics approach for SBTPs expressed in SB-TemPsy-DSL. TD-SB-TemPsy-Report relies on a set of diagnostics patterns, i.e., undesired signal behaviors that might lead to property violations. To provide relevant and detailed information about the cause of a property violation, TD-SB-TemPsy-Report determines the diagnostics information specific to each type of diagnostics pattern. Our technological contributions rely on model-driven approaches for trace checking and trace diagnostics. Such approaches consist in reducing the problem of checking (respectively, determining the diagnostics information of) a property over an execution trace to the problem of evaluating an OCL (Object Constraint Language) constraint (semantically equivalent to ) on an instance (equivalent to ) of a meta-model of the trace. The results — in terms of efficiency of our model-driven tools—presented in this thesis are in line with those presented in previous work, and confirm that model-driven technologies can lead to the development of tools that exhibit good performance from a practical standpoint, also when applied in industrial contexts