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Using schedulers to test probabilistic distributed systems

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Formal Aspects of Computing

Abstract

Formal methods are one of the most important approaches to increasing the confidence in the correctness of software systems. A formal specification can be used as an oracle in testing since one can determine whether an observed behaviour is allowed by the specification. This is an important feature of formal testing: behaviours of the system observed in testing are compared with the specification and ideally this comparison is automated. In this paper we study a formal testing framework to deal with systems that interact with their environment at physically distributed interfaces, called ports, and where choices between different possibilities are probabilistically quantified. Building on previous work, we introduce two families of schedulers to resolve nondeterministic choices among different actions of the system. The first type of schedulers, which we call global schedulers, resolves nondeterministic choices by representing the environment as a single global scheduler. The second type, which we call localised schedulers, models the environment as a set of schedulers with there being one scheduler for each port. We formally define the application of schedulers to systems and provide and study different implementation relations in this setting.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, UK

    Robert M. Hierons

  2. Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Manuel Núñez

Authors
  1. Robert M. Hierons
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  2. Manuel Núñez
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Correspondence to Manuel Núñez.

Additional information

Peter Höfner, Robert van Glabbeek and Ian Hayes

This research was partially supported by the Spanish MEC project TESIS (TIN2009-14312-C02-01) and the UK EPSRC project Testing of Probabilistic and Stochastic Systems (EP/G032572/1). Part of this research was carried out while the first author was visiting Universidad Complutense de Madrid supported by the Programa de visitantes distinguidos UCM - 2011.

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Hierons, R.M., Núñez, M. Using schedulers to test probabilistic distributed systems. Form Asp Comp 24, 679–699 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-012-0244-5

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