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Synthesis of Infinite-State Abstractions and Their Use for Software Validation

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Specification, Algebra, and Software

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8373))

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Abstract

In the recent years, several research efforts have been devoted to developing approaches to synthesize specifications of software behavior. Most of the proposed approaches addressed the inference of finite-state abstractions. The synthesized abstractions have been integrated in different validation scenarios, such as testing. While finite-state models can be effectively used as models of a software component’s behavior for certain specific purposes, they can hardly be used as full-fledged specifications. Because of their very limited expressive power, they cannot represent some of the component behaviors and may lead to synthesizing too coarse abstractions. In this paper, we survey a set of approaches that instead infer infinite-state abstractions, which can be used to express richer sets of behaviors of a software component in a black-box manner. For such approaches, we also discuss the few existing applications to software validation. In particular, we discuss the limitations and identify how, in principle, they can be used in different validation scenarios and how this opens new research directions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, P.za Leonardo Da Vinci 32, 20131, Milano, MI, Italy

    Carlo Ghezzi, Andrea Mocci & Mario Sangiorgio

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  1. Carlo Ghezzi
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  2. Andrea Mocci
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  3. Mario Sangiorgio
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Network and Information, Senshu University, 2-1-1 Higashi-mita, Tama-ku, 214-8580, Kawasaki, Kanagawa, Japan

    Shusaku Iida

  2. Department of Computer Science, Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), 201 N. Goodwin Avenue, MC 258, 61801, Urbana, IL, USA

    José Meseguer

  3. School of Information Science, Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), 1-1 Asahidai, 923-1292, Nomi, Ishikawa, Japan

    Kazuhiro Ogata

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Ghezzi, C., Mocci, A., Sangiorgio, M. (2014). Synthesis of Infinite-State Abstractions and Their Use for Software Validation. In: Iida, S., Meseguer, J., Ogata, K. (eds) Specification, Algebra, and Software. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8373. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54624-2_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54624-2_14

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