Virtual Communication Stack: Towards Building Integrated Simulator of Mobile Ad Hoc Network-based Infrastructure for Disaster Response Scenarios

Responses to disastrous events are a challenging problem, because of possible damages on communication infrastructures. For instance, after a natural disaster, infrastructures might be entirely destroyed. Different network paradigms were proposed in the literature in order to deploy adhoc network, and allow dealing with the lack of communications. However, all these solutions focus only on the performance of the network itself, without taking into account the specificities and heterogeneity of the components which use it. This comes from the difficulty to integrate models with different levels of abstraction. Consequently, verification and validation of adhoc protocols cannot guarantee that the different systems will work as expected in operational conditions. However, the DEVS theory provides some mechanisms to allow integration of models with different natures. This paper proposes an integrated simulation architecture based on DEVS which improves the accuracy of ad hoc infrastructure simulators in the case of disaster response scenarios.Comment: Preprint. Unpublishe

An approach for formal verification and simulation of discrete-event systems : a PROMELA application

De nos jours, la mise au point de logiciels ou de systèmes fiables est de plus en plus difficile. Les nouvelles technologies impliquent de plus en plus d'interactions entre composants complexes, dont l'analyse et la compréhension deviennent de plus en plus délicates. Pour pallier ce problème, les domaines de la vérification et de la validation ont connu un bond significatif avec la mise au point de nouvelles méthodes, réparties en deux grandes familles : la vérification formelle et la simulation. Longtemps considérées comme à l'opposée l'une de l'autre, les recherches récentes essaient de rapprocher ces deux grandes familles de méthodologies. Dans ce cadre, les travaux de cette thèse proposent une nouvelle approche pour intégrer la simulation dites à évènements discrets aux méthodes formelles. L'objectif est d'améliorer les méthodes formelles existantes, en les combinant à la simulation, afin de leur permettre de détecter des erreurs qu'elles ne pouvaient déceler avant, notamment sur des systèmes temporisés. Cette approche nous a conduit à la mise au point d'un nouveau langage formel, le DEv-PROMELA. Ce nouveau langage, créé à partir du PROMELA et du formalisme DEVS, est à mi-chemin entre un langage de spécifications formelles vérifiables et un formalisme de simulation. En combinant alors un model-checking traditionnel et une simulation à évènements discrets sur le modèle exprimé dans ce nouveau langage, il est alors possible de détecter et de comprendre des dysfonctionnements qu'un model-checking seul ou qu'une simulation seule n'auraient pas permis de trouver. Ce résultat est notamment illustré à travers les différents exemples étudiés dans ces travaux.Nowadays, making reliable software and systems is become harder. New technologies imply more and more interactions between complex components, whose the analysis and the understanding are become arduous.To overcome this problem, the domains of verification and validation have known a significant progress, with the emergence of new automatic methods that ensure reliability of systems. Among all these techniques, we can find two great families of tools : the formal methods and the simulation. For a long time, these two families have been considered as opposite to each other. However, recent work tries to reduce the border between them. In this context, this thesis proposes a new approach in order to integrate discrete-event simulation in formal methods. The main objective is to improve existing model-checking tools by combining them with simulation, in order to allow them detecting errors that they were not previously able to find, and especially on timed systems. This approach led us to develop a new formal language, called DEv-PROMELA. This new language, which relies on the PROMELA and on the DEVS formalism, is like both a verifiable specifications language and a simulation formalism. By combining a traditional model-checking and a discrete-event simulation on models expressed in DEv-PROMELA, it is therefore possible to detect and to understand dysfunctions which could not be found by using only a formal checking or only a simulation. This result is illustrated through the different examples which are treated in this work

Virtual Communication Stack: Towards Building Integrated Simulator of Mobile Ad Hoc Network-based Infrastructure for Disaster Response Scenarios

Responses to disastrous events are a challenging problem, because of possible damages on communication infrastructures. For instance, after a natural disaster, infrastructures might be entirely destroyed. Different network paradigms were proposed in the literature in order to deploy adhoc network, and allow dealing with the lack of communications. However, all these solutions focus only on the performance of the network itself, without taking into account the specificities and heterogeneity of the components which use it. This comes from the difficulty to integrate models with different levels of abstraction. Consequently, verification and validation of adhoc protocols cannot guarantee that the different systems will work as expected in operational conditions. However, the DEVS theory provides some mechanisms to allow integration of models with different natures. This paper proposes an integrated simulation architecture based on DEVS which improves the accuracy of ad hoc infrastructure simulators in the case of disaster response scenarios

Using DEv-PROMELA for Modelling and Verification of Software

International audienceno abstrac

Complementarity between Simulation and Formal Verification - Transformation of PROMELA Models into FDDEVS Models: Application to a Case Study

International audienc

Vérification formelle d'un réseau sur puce : Application de DEv-Promela.

National audienc

A Method for Improving the Verification and Validation of Systems by the Combined Use of Simulation and Formal Methods

International audienc

DEv-PROMELA: modeling, verification, and validation of a video game by combining model-checking and simulation

International audienceModeling, verifying, and validating are essential steps in order to build systems and software that do what designers expect. If formal verification, and especially model-checking, is a popular method for proving the correctness of properties, its efficiency depends on the accuracy of the used models and the quality of abstractions. As a consequence, applying verification techniques on large-scale complex software like video games is hard without strong assumptions and simplifications. Simulation models are generally more accurate than verification models, but it is often harder to verify them. Combined formalisms that take the benefits of both model-checking and discrete-event simulation represent a good deal between both of these families, although strong engineering expertise remains necessary to define the relevant tests and scenarios. This paper proposes an approach to build this kind of formalism through the example of DEv-PROMELA, which is built by combining Discrete-event System Specification formalism and PROMELA language. Then, it shows how combined formalisms can be used for modeling, verifying, and validating complex software like video games by using both formal-based and simulation-based verification and validation

Formal Methods and Discrete-Event Simulations

International audienc