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Explaining Violations of Properties in Control-Flow Temporal Logic

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Runtime Verification (RV 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11757))

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Abstract

Runtime Verification is the process of deciding whether a run of a program satisfies a given property. This work considers the more challenging problem of explaining why a run does or does not satisfy the property. We look at this problem in the context of CFTL, a low-level temporal logic. Our main contribution is a method for reconstructing representative execution paths, separating them into good and bad paths, and producing partial parse trees explaining their differences. This requires us to extend CFTL and our second contribution is a partial semantics used to identify the first violating observation in a trace. This is extended with a notion of severity of violation, allowing us to handle real-time properties sensitive to small timing variations. These techniques are implemented as an extension to the publicly available VyPR2 tool. Our work is motivated by results obtained applying VyPR2 to a web service on the CMS Experiment at CERN and initial tests produce useful explanations for realistic use cases.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Practically, in our implementation we target a subset of Python.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Joshua Heneage Dawes & Giles Reger

  2. CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

    Joshua Heneage Dawes

Authors
  1. Joshua Heneage Dawes
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  2. Giles Reger
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Correspondence to Joshua Heneage Dawes .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Bernd Finkbeiner

  2. University of Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy

    Leonardo Mariani

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Dawes, J.H., Reger, G. (2019). Explaining Violations of Properties in Control-Flow Temporal Logic. In: Finkbeiner, B., Mariani, L. (eds) Runtime Verification. RV 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11757. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32079-9_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32079-9_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-32078-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-32079-9

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