Abstract
Concurrent systems are often modeled using an interleaving semantics. Since system designers tend to think sequentially, it is highly probable that they do not foresee some interleavings that their model encompasses. As a consequence, one of the main sources of failure in concurrent systems is unforeseen interleavings. In this paper, we devise an automated method for revealing unforeseen interleavings in the form of sequences of actions derived from counterexamples obtained by explicit state model checking. In order to extract such sequences we use a data mining technique called sequential pattern mining. Our method is based on contrasting the patterns of a set of counterexamples with the patterns of a set of correct traces that do not violate a desired property. We first argue that mining sequential patterns from the dataset of counterexamples fails due to the inherent complexity of the problem. We then propose a reduction technique designed to reduce the length of the execution traces in order to make the problem more tractable. We finally demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by applying it to a number of sample case studies.
Supported by the Austrian National Research Network S11403-N23 (RiSE) of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through the grants “DiRePro” and “IMCOS” and by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) through grants VRG11-005, PROSEED, and ICT12-059.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Agrawal, R., Srikant, R.: Mining sequential patterns. In: ICDE (1995)
Baier, C., Katoen, J.-P.: Principles of Model Checking. The MIT Press, Massachusetts (2008)
Beer, I., Ben-David, S., Chockler, H., Orni, A., Trefler, R.: Explaining counterexamples using causality. In: Bouajjani, A., Maler, O. (eds.) CAV 2009. LNCS, vol. 5643, pp. 94–108. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Dong, G., Pei, J.: Sequence Data Mining. Springer (2007)
Fatta, G.D., Leue, S., Stegantova, E.: Discriminative pattern mining in software fault detection. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Software Quality Assurance (2006)
Groce, A., Chaki, S., Kroening, D., Strichman, O.: Error explanation with distance metrics. In: International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT) (2006)
Groce, A., Visser, W.: What went wrong: Explaining counterexamples. In: Ball, T., Rajamani, S.K. (eds.) SPIN 2003. LNCS, vol. 2648, pp. 121–135. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Halpern, J., Pearl, J.: Causes and explanations: A structural-model approach. part I: Causes. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (2005)
Holzmann, G.J.: The SPIN Model Checker: Primer and Reference Manual. Addision-Wesley (2003)
Kamel, M., Leue, S.: VIP: A visual editor and compiler for v-promela. In: Graf, S., Schwartzbach, M. (eds.) TACAS/ETAPS 2000. LNCS, vol. 1785, pp. 471–486. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Leitner-Fischer, F., Leue, S.: Causality checking for complex system models. In: Giacobazzi, R., Berdine, J., Mastroeni, I. (eds.) VMCAI 2013. LNCS, vol. 7737, pp. 248–267. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Leue, S., Tabaei Befrouei, M.: Counterexample explanation by anomaly detection. In: Donaldson, A., Parker, D. (eds.) SPIN 2012. LNCS, vol. 7385, pp. 24–42. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Lewis, D.: Counterfactuals. Wiley-Blackwell (2001)
Liu, C., Yan, X., Yu, H., Han, J., Yu, P.S.: Mining behavior graphs for backtrace of noncrashing bugs. In: Proceedings of the Fifth SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (2005)
Lo, D., Khoo, S., Liu, C.: Efficient mining of iterative patterns for software specification discovery. In: KDD (2007)
Lu, S., Tucek, J., Qin, F., Zhou, Y.: Avio: Detecting atomicity violations via access interleaving invariants. In: ASPLOS (2006)
Lucia, B., Ceze, L.: Finding concurrency bugs with context-aware communication graphs. In: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (2009)
Netzer, R., Miller, B.: Improving the accuracy of data race detection. In: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming. ACM Press (1991)
Parsa, S., Naree, S.A., Koopaei, N.E.: Software fault localization via mining execution graphs. In: Murgante, B., Gervasi, O., Iglesias, A., Taniar, D., Apduhan, B.O. (eds.) ICCSA 2011, Part II. LNCS, vol. 6783, pp. 610–623. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Pei, J., Han, J., Mortazavi-Asl, B., Pinto, H., Chen, Q., Dayal, U., Hsu, M.: Prefixspan: Mining sequential patterns efficiently by prefix-projected pattern growth. In: 17th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2001) (2001)
Pelanek, R.: Benchmarks for explicit model checkers (2006), http://anna.fi.muni.cz/models
Ramanathan, M.K., Grama, A., Jagannathan, S.: Path-sensitive inference of function precedence protocols. In: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (2007)
Savage, S., Burrows, M., Nelson, G., Sobalvarro, P., Anderson, T.: Eraser: a dynamic data race detector for multithreaded programs. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) 15(4) (1997)
Wang, C., Yang, Z., Ivančić, F., Gupta, A.: Whodunit? causal analysis for counterexamples. In: Graf, S., Zhang, W. (eds.) ATVA 2006. LNCS, vol. 4218, pp. 82–95. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Wang, J., Han, J.: Bide: Efficient mining of frequent closed sequences. In: ICDE (2004)
Yan, X., Han, J., Afshar, R.: Clospan: Mining closed sequential patterns in large datasets. In: Proceedings of 2003 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2003) (2003)
Zeller, A.: Why Programs Fail: A Guide to Systematic Debugging. Morgan Kaufmann, Burlington (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Leue, S., Befrouei, M.T. (2013). Mining Sequential Patterns to Explain Concurrent Counterexamples. In: Bartocci, E., Ramakrishnan, C.R. (eds) Model Checking Software. SPIN 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7976. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39176-7_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39176-7_17
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39175-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39176-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)