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Using flows for describing and verifying the behaviour of interactive systems

Utilisation de flots de données pour la spécification et la vérification du comportement des systèmes interactifs

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Abstract

In some contexts, especially in safety or security critical applications, it may be crucial to verify that the interactive behaviour of these systems possess certain formally expressed properties. Our project is to describe the interactive behaviour of a system by building an abstract formal model of it and to verify automatically that this behaviour possesses the required properties. In this paper, we suggest to use data flows for this purpose. We use the formal language Lustre to denote such flows. This language permits to express safety temporal properties and to build some syntactical structures in order to verify and test them by using appropriate tools.

Résumé

Certains contextes, en particulier les applications critiques du point de vue de la sûreté et de la sécurité, exigent que l’on puisse vérifier que le comportement interactif des systèmes obéit à quelques bonnes propriétés formellement établies. Les auteurs cherchent à décrire le comportement interactif d’un système en en construisant un modèle formel, afin de pouvoir vérifier qu’il satisfait les propriétés requises. Cet article explique pourquoi les flots de données constituent un bon support de modélisation. Le langage Lustre, qui dénote de tels flots, permet également l’expression de propriétés qu’il devient alors possible de vérifier sur les modèles et de tester à l’aide d’outils appropriés.

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This work has been supported by CNET-France Télécom as a collaborative project under grant 93 1B 143.

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d’Ausbourg, B., Durrieu, G. & Roche, P. Using flows for describing and verifying the behaviour of interactive systems. Ann. Télécommun. 51, 474–482 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02997709

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