State machine flattening, a mapping study and tools assessment

International audienceState machine formalisms equipped with hierarchy and parallelism allow to compactly model complex system behaviours. Such models can then be transformed into executable code or inputs for model-based testing and verification techniques. Generated artifacts are mostly flat descriptions of system behaviour. Flattening is thus an essential step of these transformations. To assess the importance of flattening, we have defined and applied a systematic mapping process and 30 publications were finally selected. However, it appeared that flattening is rarely the sole focus of the publications and that care devoted to the description and validation of flattening techniques varies greatly. Preliminary assessment of associated tool support indicated limited tool availability and scalability on challenging models. We see this initial investigation as a first step towards generic flattening techniques and scal-able tool support, cornerstones of reliable model-based behavioural development

AsmetaF: A Flattener for the ASMETA Framework

Abstract State Machines (ASMs) have shown to be a suitable high-level specification method for complex, even industrial, systems; the ASMETA framework, supporting several validation and verification activities on ASM models, is an example of a formal integrated development environment. Although ASMs allow modeling complex systems in a rather concise way -and this is advantageous for specification purposes-, such concise notation is in general a problem for verification activities as model checking and theorem proving that rely on tools accepting simpler notations. In this paper, we propose a flattener tool integrated in the ASMETA framework that transforms a general ASM model in a flattened model constituted only of update, parallel, and conditional rules; such model is easier to map to notations of verification tools. Experiments show the effect of applying the tool to some representative case studies of the ASMETA repository.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2018, arXiv:1811.09014. The first two authors are supported by ERATO HASUO Metamathematics for Systems Design Project (No. JPMJER1603), JST. Funding Reference number: 10.13039/501100009024 ERAT