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
