Using formal description technique ESTELLE for manufacturing systems specification or description

Usually the description of a system is given in natural language or in diagrams. It is very hard to make this kind of informal description clear, concise and unambiguous. Implementations based on informal specifications are usually prone to errors, omissions and incompatibilities. This paper presents an attempt to introduce Formal Description Techniques (FDT's), originally developed for the area of telecommunications and data transfer, as a mean for the specification/description of manufacturing systems. A brief introduction on standard FDT's, LOTOS, ESTELLE and SDL is given. Several concepts were behind the development of these techniques and this paper exploits the extended finite state machine (EFSM) concept as a suitable form for specification/description of manufacturing systems using FDT ESTELLE

Analysis and representation of test cases generated from LOTOS

Cataloged from PDF version of article.This paper presents a method to generate, analyse and represent test cases from protocol specification. The language of temporal ordering specification (LOTOS) is mapped into an extended finite state machine (EFSM). Test cases are generated from EFSM. The generated test cases are modelled as a dependence graph. Predicate slices are used to identify infeasible test cases that must be eliminated. Redundant assignments and predicates in all the feasible test cases are removed by reducing the test case dependence graph. The reduced test case dependence graph is adapted for a local single-layer (LS) architecture. The reduced test cases for the LS architecture are enhanced to represent the tester's behaviour. The dynamic behaviour of the test cases is represented in the form of control graphs by inverting the events, assigning verdicts to the events in the enhanced dependence graph. © 1995

Formal description technique SDL for manufacturing systems specification and description

This paper addresses the formal specification and description of manufacturing systems. It is considered the use of SDL (Specification and Description Language), a standard FDT (Formal Description Technique), to model the behaviour, data and structure aspects of a manufacturing system. SDL was originally developed for telecommunication systems (protocol specification and data processing). The adequacy of FDTs, namely SDL, for the manufacturing systems domain is investigated by developing the SDL specification of part of a Distributed/Virtual Manufacturing System cell installation (D/V MS Project), and analysing it

Easing the Transition from Inspiration to Implementation: A Rapid Prototyping Platform for Wireless Medium Access Control Protocols

Packet broadcast networks are in widespread use in modern wireless communication systems. Medium access control is a key functionality within such technologies. A substantial research effort has been and continues to be invested into the study of existing protocols and the development of new and specialised ones. Academic researchers are restricted in their studies by an absence of suitable wireless MAC protocol development methods. This thesis describes an environment which allows rapid prototyping and evaluation of wireless medium access control protocols. The proposed design flow allows specification of the protocol using the specification and description language (SDL) formal description technique. A tool is presented to convert the SDL protocol description into a C++ model suitable for integration into both simulation and implementation environments. Simulations at various levels of abstraction are shown to be relevant at different stages of protocol design. Environments based on the Cinderella SDL simulator and the ns-2 network simulator have been developed which allow early functional verification, along with detailed and accurate performance analysis of protocols under development. A hardware platform is presented which allows implementation of protocols with flexibility in the hardware/software trade-off. Measurement facilities are integral to the hardware framework, and provide a means for accurate real-world feedback on protocol performance

A Framework for Verifying Data-Centric Protocols

International audienceData centric languages, such as recursive rule based languages, have been proposed to program distributed applications over networks. They simplify greatly the code, while still admitting efficient distributed execution. We show that they also provide a promising approach to the verification of distributed protocols, thanks to their data centric orientation, which allows us to explicitly handle global structures such as the topology of the network. We consider a framework using an original formalization in the Coq proof assistant of a distributed computation model based on message passing with either synchronous or asynchronous behavior. The declarative rules of the Netlog language for specifying distributed protocols and the virtual machines for evaluating these rules are encoded in Coq as well. We consider as a case study tree protocols, and show how this framework enables us to formally verify them in both the asynchronous and synchronous setting

Test case verification by model checking

Verification of a test case for testing the conformance of protocol implementations against the formal description of the protocol involves verifying three aspects of the test case: expected input/output test behavior, test verdicts, and the test purpose. We model the safety and liveness properties of a test case using branching time temporal logic. There are four types of safety properties: transmission safety, reception safety, synchronization safety, and verdict safety. We model a test purpose as a liveness property and give a set of notations to formally specify a test purpose. All these properties expressed as temporal formulas are verified using model checking on an extended state machine graph representing the composed behavior of a test case and protocol specification. This methodology is shown to be effective in finding errors in manually developed conformance test suites. © 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers

Specification and implementation of computer network protocols

A reliable and effective computer network can only be achieved by adopting efficient and error-free communication protocols. Therefore, the protocol designer should produce an unambiguous specification meeting these requirements. Techniques for producing protocol specifications have been the subject of intense interest over the last few years. This is partly due to the advent of an international standard for networking. A variety of methods have been employed, some of which are described in detail in this thesis. [Continues.