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Software monitoring through formal specification animation

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Abstract

This paper presents a formal specification-based software monitoring approach that can dynamically and continuously monitor the behaviors of a target system and explicitly recognize undesirable behaviors in the implementation with respect to its formal specification. The key idea of our approach is in building a monitoring module that connects a specification animator with a program debugger. The requirements information about expected dynamic behaviors of the target system are gathered from the formal specification animator, while the actual behaviors of concrete implementations of the target system are obtained through the program debugger. Based on the information obtained from both sides, the judgement on the conformance of the concrete implementation with respect to the formal specification is made timely while the target system is running. Furthermore, the proposed formal specification-based software monitoring technique does not embed any instrumentation codes to the target system nor does it annotate the target system with any formal specifications. It can detect implementation errors in a real-time manner, and help the developers and users of the system to react to the problems before critical failure occurs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Hui Liang & Jin Song Dong

  2. Department of Computer Science, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Jing Sun

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, Texas, USA

    W. Eric Wong

Authors
  1. Hui Liang
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  2. Jin Song Dong
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  3. Jing Sun
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  4. W. Eric Wong
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jing Sun.

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Liang, H., Dong, J.S., Sun, J. et al. Software monitoring through formal specification animation. Innovations Syst Softw Eng 5, 231–241 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-009-0096-1

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