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A scenario based notation for specifying temporal properties

Published: 27 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Temporal logics are commonly used for reasoning about concurrent systems. Model checkers and other finite-state verification techniques allow for automated checking of system model compliance to given temporal properties. These properties are typically specified as linear-time formulae in temporal logics. Unfortunately, the level of inherent sophistication required by these formalisms too often represents an impediment to move these techniques from "research theory" to "industry practice". The objective of this work is to facilitate the non trivial and error prone task of specifying, correctly and without expertise, temporal properties.In order to understand the basis of a simple but expressive formalism for specifying temporal properties we critically analyze commonly used in practice visual notations. Then we present a scenario-based visual language that, in our opinion, fixes the highlighted lacks of these notations. We propose an extended graphical notation of a subset of UML 2.0 Interaction Sequence Diagrams. A precise semantics of this new language, called Property Sequence Chart (PSC), is provided via translation, by means of an algorithm implemented as a plugin of our charmy tool, into Büchi automata. Expressiveness of PSC has been validated with respect to well known property specification patterns.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SCESM '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Scenarios and state machines: models, algorithms, and tools
May 2006
93 pages
ISBN:1595933948
DOI:10.1145/1138953
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: 27 May 2006

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  1. scenario based notation
  2. system requirements specification
  3. temporal properties specification

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  • (2013)Scenario-Based Validation of Requirements for Context-Aware Adaptive ServicesProceedings of the 2013 IEEE 20th International Conference on Web Services10.1109/ICWS.2013.54(348-355)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2013
  • (2012)Policy modeling and compliance verification in enterprise software systems: A survey2012 IEEE 6th International Workshop on the Maintenance and Evolution of Service-Oriented and Cloud-Based Systems (MESOCA)10.1109/MESOCA.2012.6392600(27-36)Online publication date: Sep-2012
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