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Formalizing and verifying stochastic system architectures using Monterey Phoenix

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Abstract

The analysis of software architecture plays an important role in understanding the system structures and facilitate proper implementation of user requirements. Despite its importance in the software engineering practice, the lack of formal description and verification support in this domain hinders the development of quality architectural models. To tackle this problem, in this work, we develop an approach for modeling and verifying software architectures specified using Monterey Phoenix (MP) architecture description language. MP is capable of modeling system and environment behaviors based on event traces, as well as supporting different architecture composition operations and views. First, we formalize the syntax and operational semantics for MP; therefore, formal verification of MP models is feasible. Second, we extend MP to support shared variables and stochastic characteristics, which not only increases the expressiveness of MP, but also widens the properties MP can check, such as quantitative requirements. Third, a dedicated model checker for MP has been implemented, so that automatic verification of MP models is supported. Finally, several experiments are conducted to evaluate the applicability and efficiency of our approach

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Notes

  1. Without losing generality, we assume there is only one initial state in a PA.

  2. Events and actions are interchangeable in this thesis.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by “Formal Verification on Cloud” project under Grant No: M4081155.020 and “Verification of Security Protocol Implementations” project under Grant No: M4080996.020.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Songzheng Song & Yang Liu

  2. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Jiexin Zhang & Jin Song Dong

  3. Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore, Singapore

    Jun Sun

  4. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA

    Mikhail Auguston

  5. Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China

    Tieming Chen

Authors
  1. Songzheng Song
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  2. Jiexin Zhang
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  3. Yang Liu
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  4. Mikhail Auguston
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  5. Jun Sun
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  6. Jin Song Dong
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  7. Tieming Chen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Songzheng Song.

Additional information

Communicated by Dr. Perry Alexander.

This work is a substantial extension of [30]. In [30], we presented the formal syntax and operational semantics of Monterey Phoenix (MP) language. Further, a new model checker for MP was implemented, and several representative examples were conducted to show its applicability. In this work, we extend [30] mainly in two ways. First, we extend the formal syntax of MP to support probabilistic characteristics. The semantic model of MP is switched from Labeled Transition Systems (LTS) to Probabilistic Automata (PA). Therefore, the model checker of MP now supports modeling and verifying stochastic software architectures. Second, shared variables are now supported in MP, which makes the modeling of MP expressive and convenient. In a nutshell, the extensions of MP in this work increase its expressiveness to cover more scenarios.

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Song, S., Zhang, J., Liu, Y. et al. Formalizing and verifying stochastic system architectures using Monterey Phoenix. Softw Syst Model 15, 453–471 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-014-0411-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-014-0411-7

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