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Asynchronous multi-process timed automata

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Abstract

High-quality asynchronous programs are needed urgently to exploit multi-core hardware and cloud platforms. However, in real-time systems, formal models such as timed automata (TAs) are limited to concurrent programs where the number of processes is constant and no process is triggered on-the-fly. To better support the verification of asynchronous programs, we propose a new model called asynchronous multi-process timed automata (APTAs) based on TAs. Processes are abstracted as process timed automata (PTAs), which are almost the same as TAs except some states are for triggering new processes. A multiset is used to buffer triggered instances. The model is sufficiently expressive to describe real-time asynchronous programs with dynamic process creation. We show that the coverability problem, which is used for checking safety property of programs, is decidable by encoding it into read-arc timed Petri nets (RTPNs). We then propose an algorithm for the coverability problem and provide a proof of the termination and correctness.

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Acknowledgements

This study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61672340, 61472238, and 61472240).

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Guoqiang Li & Li Liu

  2. Graduate School of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, 819-0395, Japan

    Akira Fukuda

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  1. Guoqiang Li
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  2. Li Liu
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  3. Akira Fukuda
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Correspondence to Guoqiang Li.

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Li, G., Liu, L. & Fukuda, A. Asynchronous multi-process timed automata. Software Qual J 26, 961–989 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-017-9380-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-017-9380-8

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