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Verification and abstraction of real-time variability-intensive systems

  • Foundations for Mastering Change
  • Quantitative Variability Modelling and Analysis
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Abstract

Featured timed automaton (FTA) is a concise formalism to model the real-time behaviour of variability-intensive systems. FTA extends the timed automaton by allowing optional transitions and clock constraints that are relevant only for a subset of the system variants. Then, one can verify a variant individually by deriving the corresponding TA from the FTA and using established tools like UPPAAL or apply family-based algorithms to verify all variants at once. These latter algorithms consist of computing the reachability relation in FTA as an antichain. Yet, they suffer from a three-source complexity: the number of states, the number of time clocks and the number of variants. This motivates the design of abstraction refinement heuristics to reduce verification effort. In this paper, we present the syntax and semantics of FTA, efficient algorithms to compute their reachability relations, and discuss how abstraction methods can be applied.

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Notes

  1. This is without loss of generality, since variability and time in FTA can be considered orthogonally.

  2. This is akin to the restriction operator defined in [18] for FTS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Interdisciplinary Centre on Security, Reliabiliy and Trust, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Maxime Cordy

  2. Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium

    Axel Legay

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  1. Maxime Cordy
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  2. Axel Legay
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Correspondence to Maxime Cordy.

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Maxime Cordy: This work was partly done when Maxime Cordy was working at the University of Namur. Axel Legay: This work was partly done when Axel Legay was working at Inria.

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Cordy, M., Legay, A. Verification and abstraction of real-time variability-intensive systems. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 21, 635–649 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-019-00537-z

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