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International Workshop on Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language and Method

SOFL+MSVL 2013: Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language and Method pp 175–191Cite as

Checking Internal Consistency of SOFL Specification: A Hybrid Approach

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8332))

Abstract

A SOFL specification can be written with errors inside, leading to an untrustable situation for implementation. Some techniques, such as specification review and testing, have been proposed to detect and remove the errors from the specification as early as possible. Meanwhile these techniques face strong challenges when applied to practice in that they strongly rely on human intelligence to either cautiously design a review task tree for directing the whole review process, or design some test inputs to “run” the specification. The completeness of the review or testing tasks also remains a problem. In this paper we propose a hybrid approach to checking the internal consistency of a SOFL specification. The internal consistency is an important property indicating that the entire specification can work properly. The essential idea of the hybrid approach is to adopt the different strategies to check the different aspects of the specification: concrete or abstract values are used to check the satisfiability of a process, and the symbolic execution and the deduction techniques can be used to check the internal consistency of the specification at the integration level. We also use a Sort-Search example to illustrate the use of the hybrid approach.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable and thorough comments. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 91118004 and 61100051) and Shanghai Key Laboratory of Computer Software Testing and Evaluating (Grant No. SSTL2011_02).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Yuting Chen

  2. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Computer Software Testing and Evaluating, Shanghai, China

    Yuting Chen

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  1. Yuting Chen
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Correspondence to Yuting Chen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hosei University, Koganei-shi, Tokyo, Japan

    Shaoying Liu

  2. Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an, China

    Zhenhua Duan

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Chen, Y. (2014). Checking Internal Consistency of SOFL Specification: A Hybrid Approach. In: Liu, S., Duan, Z. (eds) Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language and Method. SOFL+MSVL 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8332. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04915-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04915-1_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-04914-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-04915-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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