Article

Verifying fault-tolerant Erlang programs

Authors:

Clara Benac Earle,

Lars-Åke Fredlund,

John DerrickAuthors Info & Claims

ERLANG '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Erlang

Pages 26 - 34

https://doi.org/10.1145/1088361.1088367

Published: 26 September 2005 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper we target the verification of fault tolerant aspects of distributed applications written in Erlang. Erlang is unusual in several respects. First, it is one of a few functional languages that is used in industry. Secondly the programming language contains support for concurrency and distribution as well as including constructs for handling fault-tolerance.Erlang programmers, of course, mostly work with ready-made language components. Our approach to verification of fault tolerance is to verify systems built using two central components of most Erlang software, a generic server component with fault tolerance handling, and a supervisor component that restarts failed processes.To verify Erlang programs built using these components we automatically translate them into processes of the μCRL process algebra, generate their state spaces, and use a model checker to determine whether they satisfy correctness properties specified in the μ-calculus.The key observation of this paper is that, due to the usage of these higher-level design patterns (supervisors and generic servers) that structure process communication and fault recovery, the state space generated from a Erlang program, even with failures occurring, is relatively small, and can be generated automatically. Moreover the method is independent from the actual Erlang program studied, and is thus reusable.We demonstrate the approach in a case study where a server, built using the generic server component, implements a locking service for a number of client processes, and show that the server tolerates client failures.

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Cited By

McNally MChaplin JMartinez-Arellano GRatchev S(2020)Towards Flexible, Fault Tolerant Hardware Service Wrappers for the Digital Manufacturing on a Shoestring ProjectIFAC-PapersOnLine10.1016/j.ifacol.2020.11.06553:3(72-77)Online publication date: 2020
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2020.11.065
Shishkin EChechina NFritchie S(2017)Construction and formal verification of a fault-tolerant distributed mutual exclusion algorithmProceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Erlang10.1145/3123569.3123571(1-12)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3123569.3123571
Guo QDerrick JEarle CFredlund L(2010)Model-checking ErlangProceedings of the 5th international academic and industrial conference on Testing - practice and research techniques10.5555/1885930.1885937(23-38)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1885930.1885937
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Verifying fault-tolerant Erlang programs

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cover image ACM Conferences

ERLANG '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Erlang

September 2005

94 pages

ISBN:1595930663

DOI:10.1145/1088361

General Chair:
Kostis Sagonas
Uppsala University, Sweden
,
Program Chair:
Joe Armstrong
Ericsson, Sweden

Copyright © 2005 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 26 September 2005

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ERLANG05

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ERLANG05: Erlang Workshop 2005 ( co-located with ICFP 2005 )

September 26 - 28, 2005

Tallinn, Estonia

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Overall Acceptance Rate 51 of 68 submissions, 75%

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Cited By

McNally MChaplin JMartinez-Arellano GRatchev S(2020)Towards Flexible, Fault Tolerant Hardware Service Wrappers for the Digital Manufacturing on a Shoestring ProjectIFAC-PapersOnLine10.1016/j.ifacol.2020.11.06553:3(72-77)Online publication date: 2020
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2020.11.065
Shishkin EChechina NFritchie S(2017)Construction and formal verification of a fault-tolerant distributed mutual exclusion algorithmProceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Erlang10.1145/3123569.3123571(1-12)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3123569.3123571
Guo QDerrick JEarle CFredlund L(2010)Model-checking ErlangProceedings of the 5th international academic and industrial conference on Testing - practice and research techniques10.5555/1885930.1885937(23-38)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1885930.1885937
Guo QDerrick J(2010)Formally based tool support for model checking Erlang applicationsInternational Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer10.1007/s10009-010-0179-113:4(355-376)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2010
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-010-0179-1
Guo QDerrick JBenac Earle CFredlund L(2010)Model-Checking Erlang – A Comparison between EtomCRL2 and McErlangTesting – Practice and Research Techniques10.1007/978-3-642-15585-7_5(23-38)Online publication date: 2010
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15585-7_5
Guo QDerrick JHoch C(2008)Verifying Erlang Telecommunication Systems with the Process Algebra μCRLProceedings of the 28th IFIP WG 6.1 international conference on Formal Techniques for Networked and Distributed Systems10.1007/978-3-540-68855-6_13(201-217)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-540-68855-6_13
Guo QDerrick JThompson SFredlund L(2007)Verification of timed erlang/OTP components using the process algebra μcrlProceedings of the 2007 SIGPLAN workshop on ERLANG Workshop10.1145/1292520.1292529(55-64)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1292520.1292529

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