Family-Based Modeling and Analysis for Probabilistic Systems

Feature-based formalisms provide an elegant way to specify families of systems that share a base functionality and differ in certain features. They can also facilitate an all-in-one analysis, where all systems of the family are analyzed at once on a single family model instead of one-by-one. This paper presents the basic concepts of the tool ProFeat, which provides a guarded-command language for modeling families of probabilistic systems and an automatic translation of family models to the input language of the probabilistic model checker PRISM. This translational approach enables a family-based quantitative analysis with PRISM. Besides modeling families of systems that differ in system parameters such as the number of identical processes or channel sizes, ProFeat also provides special support for the modeling and analysis of (probabilistic) product lines with dynamic feature switches, multi-features and feature attributes. By means of several case studies we show how ProFeat eases family-based modeling and compare the one-by-one and all-in-one analysis approach

Modeling Role-Based Systems with Exogenous Coordination

The concept of roles is a promising approach to cope with context dependency and adaptivity of modern software systems. While roles have been investigated in conceptual modeling, programming languages and multi-agent systems, they have been given little consideration within component-based systems. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical role-based approach for modeling relationships and collaborations between components. In particular, we consider the channel-based, exogenous coordination language Reo and discuss possible realizations of roles and related concepts. The static requirements on the binding of roles are modeled by rule sets expressed in many-sorted second-order logic and annotations on the Reo networks for role binding, context and collaborations, while Reo connectors are used to model the coordination of runtime role playing. The ideas presented in this paper may serve as a basis for the formalization and formal analysis of role-based software systems

Decentrally Coordinated Execution of Adaptations in Distributed Self-Adaptive Software Systems

Software systems in domains like Smart Cities, the Internet of Things or autonomous cars are coined by a high degree of distribution across several independent computing devices and the requirement to be able to adjust themselves to varying situations in their operational environment. Self-adaptive software systems are a natural choice to implement such context-dependent software systems. A multitude of approaches already implement self-adaptive systems and some consider even distribution aspects.Yet, none of the existing solutions supports the coordination of adaptation operations spanning multiple independent nodes, which is necessary to ensure a consistent adaptation even in presence of network errors or node failures. In this paper, we tackle this challenge to execute adaptations in distributed self-adaptive software systems in a coordinated manner. We present a protocol that enables the self-adaptive software system to execute correlated adaptations on multiple nodes in a transactional manner ensuring an atomic and consistent transition of the distributed system from its source to the desired target configuration. The protocol is validated to be free of deadlocks for any given adaptation at any point in time using a model-checking approach. The performance of our approach is investigated in experiments that emulate the protocol's execution on real devices for different sizes of distributed applications and adaptation scenarios

Formal Analysis of Variability-Intensive and Context-Sensitive Systems

With the widespread use of information systems in modern society comes a growing demand for customizable and adaptable software. As a result, systems are increasingly developed as families of products adapted to specific contexts and requirements. Features are an established concept to capture the commonalities and variability between system variants. Most prominently, the concept is applied in the design, modeling, analysis, and implementation of software product lines where products are built upon a common base and are distinguished by their features. While adaptations encapsulated within features are mainly static and remain part of the system after deployment, dynamic adaptations become increasingly important. Especially interconnected mobile devices and embedded systems are required to be context-sensitive and (self-)adaptive. A promising concept for the design and implementation of such systems are roles as they capture context-dependent and collaboration-specific behavior. A major challenge in the development of feature-oriented and role-based systems are interactions, i.e., emergent behavior that arises from the combination of multiple features or roles. As the number of possible combinations is usually exponential in the number of features and roles, the detection of such interactions is difficult. Since unintended interactions may compromise the functional correctness of a system and may lead to reduced efficiency or reliability, it is desirable to detect them as early as possible in the development process. The goal of this thesis is to adopt the concepts of features and roles in the formal modeling and analysis of systems and system families. In particular, the focus is on the quantitative analysis of operational models by means of probabilistic model checking for supporting the development process and for ensuring correctness. The tool ProFeat, which enables a quantitative analysis of stochastic system families defined in terms of features, has been extended with additional language constructs, support for a one-by-one analysis of system variants, and a symbolic representation of analysis results. The implementation is evaluated by means of several case studies which compare different analysis approaches and show how ProFeat facilitates a family-based quantitative analysis of systems. For the compositional modeling of role-based systems, role-based automata (RBA) are introduced. The thesis presents a modeling language that is based on the input language of the probabilistic model checker PRISM to compactly describe RBA. Accompanying tool support translates RBA models into the PRISM language to enable the formal analysis of functional and non-functional properties, including system dynamics, contextual changes, and interactions. Furthermore, an approach for a declarative and compositional definition of role coordinators based on the exogenous coordination language Reo is proposed. The adequacy of the RBA approach for detecting interactions within context-sensitive and adaptive systems is shown by several case studies.:1 Introduction 1.1 Engineering approaches for variant-rich adaptive systems 1.2 Validation and verification methods 1.3 Analysis of feature-oriented and role-based systems 1.4 Contribution 1.5 Outline 2 Preliminaries I Feature-oriented systems 3 Feature-oriented engineering for family-based analysis 3.1 Feature-oriented development 3.2 Describing system families: The ProFeat language 3.2.1 Feature-oriented language constructs 3.2.2 Parametrization 3.2.3 Metaprogramming language extensions 3.2.4 Property specifications 3.2.5 Semantics 3.3 Implementation 3.3.1 Translation of ProFeat models 3.3.2 Post-processing of analysis results 4 Case studies and application areas 4.1 Comparing family-based and product-based analysis 4.1.1 Analysis of feature-oriented systems 4.1.2 Analysis of parametrized systems 4.2 Software product lines 4.2.1 Body sensor network 4.2.2 Elevator product line 4.3 Self-adaptive systems 4.3.1 Adaptive network system model 4.3.2 Adaptation protocol for distributed systems II Role-based Systems 5 Formal modeling and analysis of role-based systems 5.1 The role concept 5.1.1 Towards a common notion of roles 5.1.2 The Compartment Role Object Model 5.1.3 Roles in programming languages 5.2 Compositional modeling of role-based behavior 5.2.1 Role-based automata and their composition 5.2.2 Algebraic properties of compositions 5.2.3 Coordination and semantics of RBA 6 Implementation of a role-oriented modeling language 6.1 Role-oriented modeling language 6.1.1 Declaration of the system structure 6.1.2 Definition of operational behavior 6.2 Translation of role-based models 6.2.1 Transformation to multi-action MDPs 6.2.2 Multi-action extension of PRISM 6.2.3 Translation of components 6.2.4 Translation of role-playing coordinators 6.2.5 Encoding role-playing into states 7 Exogenous coordination of roles 7.1 The exogenous coordination language Reo 7.2 Constraint automata 7.3 Embedding of role-based automata in constraint automata 7.4 Implementation 7.4.1 Exogenous coordination of PRISM modules 7.4.2 Reo for exogenous coordination within PRISM 8 Evaluation of the role-oriented approach 8.1 Experimental studies 8.1.1 Peer-to-peer file transfer 8.1.2 Self-adaptive production cell 8.1.3 File transfer with exogenous coordination 8.2 Classification 8.3 Related work 8.3.1 Role-based approaches 8.3.2 Aspect-oriented approaches 8.3.3 Feature-oriented approaches 9 Conclusio

Formal Analysis of Variability-Intensive and Context-Sensitive Systems

With the widespread use of information systems in modern society comes a growing demand for customizable and adaptable software. As a result, systems are increasingly developed as families of products adapted to specific contexts and requirements. Features are an established concept to capture the commonalities and variability between system variants. Most prominently, the concept is applied in the design, modeling, analysis, and implementation of software product lines where products are built upon a common base and are distinguished by their features. While adaptations encapsulated within features are mainly static and remain part of the system after deployment, dynamic adaptations become increasingly important. Especially interconnected mobile devices and embedded systems are required to be context-sensitive and (self-)adaptive. A promising concept for the design and implementation of such systems are roles as they capture context-dependent and collaboration-specific behavior. A major challenge in the development of feature-oriented and role-based systems are interactions, i.e., emergent behavior that arises from the combination of multiple features or roles. As the number of possible combinations is usually exponential in the number of features and roles, the detection of such interactions is difficult. Since unintended interactions may compromise the functional correctness of a system and may lead to reduced efficiency or reliability, it is desirable to detect them as early as possible in the development process. The goal of this thesis is to adopt the concepts of features and roles in the formal modeling and analysis of systems and system families. In particular, the focus is on the quantitative analysis of operational models by means of probabilistic model checking for supporting the development process and for ensuring correctness. The tool ProFeat, which enables a quantitative analysis of stochastic system families defined in terms of features, has been extended with additional language constructs, support for a one-by-one analysis of system variants, and a symbolic representation of analysis results. The implementation is evaluated by means of several case studies which compare different analysis approaches and show how ProFeat facilitates a family-based quantitative analysis of systems. For the compositional modeling of role-based systems, role-based automata (RBA) are introduced. The thesis presents a modeling language that is based on the input language of the probabilistic model checker PRISM to compactly describe RBA. Accompanying tool support translates RBA models into the PRISM language to enable the formal analysis of functional and non-functional properties, including system dynamics, contextual changes, and interactions. Furthermore, an approach for a declarative and compositional definition of role coordinators based on the exogenous coordination language Reo is proposed. The adequacy of the RBA approach for detecting interactions within context-sensitive and adaptive systems is shown by several case studies.:1 Introduction 1.1 Engineering approaches for variant-rich adaptive systems 1.2 Validation and verification methods 1.3 Analysis of feature-oriented and role-based systems 1.4 Contribution 1.5 Outline 2 Preliminaries I Feature-oriented systems 3 Feature-oriented engineering for family-based analysis 3.1 Feature-oriented development 3.2 Describing system families: The ProFeat language 3.2.1 Feature-oriented language constructs 3.2.2 Parametrization 3.2.3 Metaprogramming language extensions 3.2.4 Property specifications 3.2.5 Semantics 3.3 Implementation 3.3.1 Translation of ProFeat models 3.3.2 Post-processing of analysis results 4 Case studies and application areas 4.1 Comparing family-based and product-based analysis 4.1.1 Analysis of feature-oriented systems 4.1.2 Analysis of parametrized systems 4.2 Software product lines 4.2.1 Body sensor network 4.2.2 Elevator product line 4.3 Self-adaptive systems 4.3.1 Adaptive network system model 4.3.2 Adaptation protocol for distributed systems II Role-based Systems 5 Formal modeling and analysis of role-based systems 5.1 The role concept 5.1.1 Towards a common notion of roles 5.1.2 The Compartment Role Object Model 5.1.3 Roles in programming languages 5.2 Compositional modeling of role-based behavior 5.2.1 Role-based automata and their composition 5.2.2 Algebraic properties of compositions 5.2.3 Coordination and semantics of RBA 6 Implementation of a role-oriented modeling language 6.1 Role-oriented modeling language 6.1.1 Declaration of the system structure 6.1.2 Definition of operational behavior 6.2 Translation of role-based models 6.2.1 Transformation to multi-action MDPs 6.2.2 Multi-action extension of PRISM 6.2.3 Translation of components 6.2.4 Translation of role-playing coordinators 6.2.5 Encoding role-playing into states 7 Exogenous coordination of roles 7.1 The exogenous coordination language Reo 7.2 Constraint automata 7.3 Embedding of role-based automata in constraint automata 7.4 Implementation 7.4.1 Exogenous coordination of PRISM modules 7.4.2 Reo for exogenous coordination within PRISM 8 Evaluation of the role-oriented approach 8.1 Experimental studies 8.1.1 Peer-to-peer file transfer 8.1.2 Self-adaptive production cell 8.1.3 File transfer with exogenous coordination 8.2 Classification 8.3 Related work 8.3.1 Role-based approaches 8.3.2 Aspect-oriented approaches 8.3.3 Feature-oriented approaches 9 Conclusio

Formal Analysis of Variability-Intensive and Context-Sensitive Systems

With the widespread use of information systems in modern society comes a growing demand for customizable and adaptable software. As a result, systems are increasingly developed as families of products adapted to specific contexts and requirements. Features are an established concept to capture the commonalities and variability between system variants. Most prominently, the concept is applied in the design, modeling, analysis, and implementation of software product lines where products are built upon a common base and are distinguished by their features. While adaptations encapsulated within features are mainly static and remain part of the system after deployment, dynamic adaptations become increasingly important. Especially interconnected mobile devices and embedded systems are required to be context-sensitive and (self-)adaptive. A promising concept for the design and implementation of such systems are roles as they capture context-dependent and collaboration-specific behavior. A major challenge in the development of feature-oriented and role-based systems are interactions, i.e., emergent behavior that arises from the combination of multiple features or roles. As the number of possible combinations is usually exponential in the number of features and roles, the detection of such interactions is difficult. Since unintended interactions may compromise the functional correctness of a system and may lead to reduced efficiency or reliability, it is desirable to detect them as early as possible in the development process. The goal of this thesis is to adopt the concepts of features and roles in the formal modeling and analysis of systems and system families. In particular, the focus is on the quantitative analysis of operational models by means of probabilistic model checking for supporting the development process and for ensuring correctness. The tool ProFeat, which enables a quantitative analysis of stochastic system families defined in terms of features, has been extended with additional language constructs, support for a one-by-one analysis of system variants, and a symbolic representation of analysis results. The implementation is evaluated by means of several case studies which compare different analysis approaches and show how ProFeat facilitates a family-based quantitative analysis of systems. For the compositional modeling of role-based systems, role-based automata (RBA) are introduced. The thesis presents a modeling language that is based on the input language of the probabilistic model checker PRISM to compactly describe RBA. Accompanying tool support translates RBA models into the PRISM language to enable the formal analysis of functional and non-functional properties, including system dynamics, contextual changes, and interactions. Furthermore, an approach for a declarative and compositional definition of role coordinators based on the exogenous coordination language Reo is proposed. The adequacy of the RBA approach for detecting interactions within context-sensitive and adaptive systems is shown by several case studies.:1 Introduction 1.1 Engineering approaches for variant-rich adaptive systems 1.2 Validation and verification methods 1.3 Analysis of feature-oriented and role-based systems 1.4 Contribution 1.5 Outline 2 Preliminaries I Feature-oriented systems 3 Feature-oriented engineering for family-based analysis 3.1 Feature-oriented development 3.2 Describing system families: The ProFeat language 3.2.1 Feature-oriented language constructs 3.2.2 Parametrization 3.2.3 Metaprogramming language extensions 3.2.4 Property specifications 3.2.5 Semantics 3.3 Implementation 3.3.1 Translation of ProFeat models 3.3.2 Post-processing of analysis results 4 Case studies and application areas 4.1 Comparing family-based and product-based analysis 4.1.1 Analysis of feature-oriented systems 4.1.2 Analysis of parametrized systems 4.2 Software product lines 4.2.1 Body sensor network 4.2.2 Elevator product line 4.3 Self-adaptive systems 4.3.1 Adaptive network system model 4.3.2 Adaptation protocol for distributed systems II Role-based Systems 5 Formal modeling and analysis of role-based systems 5.1 The role concept 5.1.1 Towards a common notion of roles 5.1.2 The Compartment Role Object Model 5.1.3 Roles in programming languages 5.2 Compositional modeling of role-based behavior 5.2.1 Role-based automata and their composition 5.2.2 Algebraic properties of compositions 5.2.3 Coordination and semantics of RBA 6 Implementation of a role-oriented modeling language 6.1 Role-oriented modeling language 6.1.1 Declaration of the system structure 6.1.2 Definition of operational behavior 6.2 Translation of role-based models 6.2.1 Transformation to multi-action MDPs 6.2.2 Multi-action extension of PRISM 6.2.3 Translation of components 6.2.4 Translation of role-playing coordinators 6.2.5 Encoding role-playing into states 7 Exogenous coordination of roles 7.1 The exogenous coordination language Reo 7.2 Constraint automata 7.3 Embedding of role-based automata in constraint automata 7.4 Implementation 7.4.1 Exogenous coordination of PRISM modules 7.4.2 Reo for exogenous coordination within PRISM 8 Evaluation of the role-oriented approach 8.1 Experimental studies 8.1.1 Peer-to-peer file transfer 8.1.2 Self-adaptive production cell 8.1.3 File transfer with exogenous coordination 8.2 Classification 8.3 Related work 8.3.1 Role-based approaches 8.3.2 Aspect-oriented approaches 8.3.3 Feature-oriented approaches 9 Conclusio

ProFeat: Feature-oriented engineering for family-based probabilistic model checking

The concept of features provides an elegant way to specify families of systems. Given a base system, features encapsulate additional functionalities that can be activated or deactivated to enhance or restrict the base system’s behaviors. Features can also facilitate the analysis of families of systems by exploiting commonalities of the family members and performing an all-in-one analysis, where all systems of the family are analyzed at once on a single family model instead of one-by-one. Most prominent, the concept of features has been successfully applied to describe and analyze (software) product lines. We present the tool ProFeat that supports the feature-oriented engineering process for stochastic systems by probabilistic model checking. To describe families of stochastic systems, ProFeat extends models for the prominent probabilistic model checker Prism by feature-oriented concepts, including support for probabilistic product lines with dynamic feature switches, multi-features and feature attributes. ProFeat provides a compact symbolic representation of the analysis results for each family member obtained by Prism to support, e.g., model repair or refinement during feature-oriented development. By means of several case studies we show how ProFeat eases family-based quantitative analysis and compare one-by-one and all-in-one analysis approaches

Modeling Role-Based Systems with Exogenous Coordination

The concept of roles is a promising approach to cope with context dependency and adaptivity of modern software systems. While roles have been investigated in conceptual modeling, programming languages and multi-agent systems, they have been given little consideration within component-based systems. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical role-based approach for modeling relationships and collaborations between components. In particular, we consider the channel-based, exogenous coordination language Reo and discuss possible realizations of roles and related concepts. The static requirements on the binding of roles are modeled by rule sets expressed in many-sorted second-order logic and annotations on the Reo networks for role binding, context and collaborations, while Reo connectors are used to model the coordination of runtime role playing. The ideas presented in this paper may serve as a basis for the formalization and formal analysis of role-based software systems

Energy-Utility Analysis of Probabilistic Systems with Exogenous Coordination

We present an extension of the popular probabilistic model checker PRISM with multi-actions that enables the modeling of complex coordination between stochastic components in an exogenous manner. This is supported by tooling that allows the use of the exogenous coordination language Reo for specifying the coordination glue code. The tool provides an automatic compilation feature for translating a Reo network of channels into PRISM's guarded command language. Additionally, the tool supports the translation of reward monitoring components that can be attached to the Reo network to assign rewards or cost to activity within the coordination network. The semantics of the translated model is then based on weighted Markov decision processes that yield the basis, e.g., for a quantitative analysis using PRISM. Feasibility of the approach is shown by a quantitative analysis of an energy-aware network system example modeled with a role-based modeling approach in Reo

Advances in probabilistic model checking with PRISM

The popular model checker PRISM has been successfully used for the modeling and analysis of complex probabilistic systems. As one way to tackle the challenging state explosion problem, PRISM supports symbolic storage and manipulation using multi-terminal binary decision diagrams for representing the models and in the computations. However, it lacks automated heuristics for variable reordering, even though it is well known that the order of BDD variables plays a crucial role for compact representations and efficient computations. In this article, we present a collection of extensions to PRISM. First, we provide support for automatic variable reordering within the symbolic engines of PRISM and allow users to manually control the variable ordering at a fine-grained level. Second, we provide extensions in the realm of reward-bounded properties, namely symbolic computations of quantiles in Markov decision processes and, for both the explicit and symbolic engines, the approximative computation of quantiles for continuous-time Markov chains as well as support for multi-reward-bounded properties. Finally, we provide an implementation for obtaining minimal weak deterministic Büchi automata for the obligation fragment of linear temporal logic (LTL), with applications for expected accumulated reward computations with a finite horizon given by a co-safe LTL formula