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Product Line Verification via Modal Meta Model Checking

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From Software Engineering to Formal Methods and Tools, and Back

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11865))

Abstract

Modal Meta Model Checking (M3C) is a method and tool supporting meta-level product lining and evolution that comprises both context-free system structure and modal refinement. The underlying Context-Free Modal Transition Systems (CFMTSs) can be regarded as loose specifications of meta models, and modal refinement as a way to increase the specificity of allowed domain specific languages (DSLs) by constraining the range of allowed syntax specifications. Model checking with M3C allows one to verify properties specified in a branching-time logic for all DSLs of a given level of specificity in one go. The paper illustrates the impact of M3C in an industrial setting where well-formed documents serve as contracts between a provider and its customers in two steps: it establishes CFMTS as a formalism to specify product lines of document description types (DTDs – or related formalisms like JSON schema), and it shows how M3C-based product line verification can be used to guarantee that violations of essential well-formedness constraints of a corresponding user document are detected by standard DTD-checkers. The resulting hierarchical product line verification allows Creios GmbH, a service provider for E-commerce systems to provide a wide range of tailored shop applications whose essential business rules are checked by a standard DTD-checker.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Our meta tooling suite CINCO [29] would, indeed, be ideally suited to generate an FTS-based development environment.

  2. 2.

    We avoid the standard notion print product here in order to avoid confusion: the products of the product line are shop applications which allow customers to configure their print goods.

  3. 3.

    It is accidental that it holds for the four products discussed in Sect. 4.1.

  4. 4.

    https://www.creios.net.

  5. 5.

    Alternatively, one can regard CFMTSs also as an extension of Context-Free Process Systems [9] to also allow may transitions.

  6. 6.

    In [19, 20] a conceptually similar structure to CFMTSs is called Systems of Procedural Automata (SPAs) to better match the terminology used in the field of automata learning.

  7. 7.

    http://fmt.isti.cnr.it/kandisti/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair for Programming Systems, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

    Tim Tegeler, Alnis Murtovi, Markus Frohme & Bernhard Steffen

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  1. Tim Tegeler
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Correspondence to Bernhard Steffen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Pisa, Italy

    Maurice H. ter Beek

  2. Università degli Studi di Firenze, Florence, Italy

    Alessandro Fantechi

  3. Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Laura Semini

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Tegeler, T., Murtovi, A., Frohme, M., Steffen, B. (2019). Product Line Verification via Modal Meta Model Checking. In: ter Beek, M., Fantechi, A., Semini, L. (eds) From Software Engineering to Formal Methods and Tools, and Back. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11865. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30985-5_19

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