Verification and behavior abstraction towards a tractable verification technique for large distributed systems

doi:10.1016/0164-1212(96)00026-X

Journal of Systems and Software

Volume 33, Issue 3, June 1996, Pages 273-285

https://doi.org/10.1016/0164-1212(96)00026-X Get rights and content

Abstract

In this article, we present a method for coping with the complexity of verification of industrial sized distributed systems' specifications. To formally verify a specification of a distributed system, one usually constructs the complete state-space for the specification and then checks if the behavior represented by the state-space has the properties one wants it to have. Such an approach is usually limited to rather small specifications because we are confronted with what is known as the state-space explosion problem. That means that, because of interleavings, for medium or even small-sized specifications, the corresponding state-space becomes so large that usual verification techniques become intractable.

Because it is often not necessary to have present all information about the distributed system, we can calculate abstractions of the behavior of a distributed system whose state-space representation is much smaller than the state-space that represents the complete behavior. Methods exist for computing the abstracted state-space directly from the specification without having to compute the state-space for the complete behavior. We will show in this article how properties verified for an abstracted behavior can be retranslated into corresponding properties of the complete behavior. Especially for liveness properties with respect to the behavior, this is a nontrivial problem. But we will show that restrictions exist that are easily satisfied by specifications of practical interest that allow the retranslation of such liveness properties from the abstracted to the complete behavior.

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Application of formal verification and behaviour abstraction to the service interaction problem in intelligent networks
1998, Journal of Systems and Software
One of the major drawbacks for the use of formal methods is the excessive size of the state-spaces representing behaviours of industrial-sized specifications of concrete systems. Existing verification algorithms simply are often not applicable to the large systems of practical relevance. One can improve the applicability of verification methods by orders of magnitude by ignoring parts of a behaviour which contain no information with respect to a given verification task. We focus on exactly such an abstraction based way of dealing with large, so called industrial-sized systems and discuss its application in an industrial project aiming at the detection of service interactions in Intelligent Networks on the specification level. The concrete application of the abstraction and verification method is presented mainly by considering an example taken from the service interaction project.
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1996, Information Processing Letters
We define a new satisfaction relation for properties of a system's behaviour, approximate satisfaction. We show, for approximately satisfied properties, that they can be partitioned into a safety and a liveness property similar to linear properties. We will see that approximate satisfaction and linear satisfaction are equivalent for safety but different for liveness properties. For practical and complexity reasons, we show that an abstraction of the behaviour of a system will preserve approximately satisfied properties, if and only if the abstraction is defined by a simple homomorphism on the behaviour.
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^∗: Supported by a DAAD-fellowship HSP II/AUFE. Parts of this article were finished when the author was visiting the University of Liège, Belgium.

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Verification and behavior abstraction towards a tractable verification technique for large distributed systems

Abstract

Information Processing Letters

Computer Networks and ISDN-Systems

Studienbücher Informatik

Product Nets—a Formal Description Technique for Co-operating Systems

A practical technique for process abstraction, in Best

On a decision method in restricted second order arithmetic

Design and synthesis of synchronization skeletons using branching-time temporal logic, in Logic of programs 1981

Automatic Verification of Finite-State Concurrent Systems Using Temporal Logic Specifications

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems

Formal verification of telecommunication service interactions using SDL methods and tools

Temporal and modal logic

Property preserving abstractions under parallel composition

A Partial Approach to Model Checking

Using partial orders for the efficient verification of deadlock freedom and safety properties

Using Partial Orders for the Efficient Verification of Deadlock Freedom and Safety Properties

Formal Methods in System Design