Bowles, Juliana and Caminati, Marco B. (2016) Mind the gap:addressing behavioural inconsistencies with formal methods. In: 2016 23rd Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC). IEEE. ISBN 9781509055753
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
In complex system design, it is important to construct several design models focusing on different aspects of a system to gain a better understanding of individual component structure and behaviour. Scenarios of execution are commonly used to specify partial behaviour and interactions between a group of system objects or components. However, partial specifications may hide inconsistencies or an otherwise unintentionally incomplete or underspecified behavioural model. This paper proposes a new powerful technique combining constraint solvers and theorem provers to complete partial specifications and determine overall model inconsistencies. We use a true-concurrent model, namely labelled event structures, which can be used as the underlying semantics of widely used work flow or scenario-based languages. We show how an interplay between the theorem prover Isabelle and constraint solver Z3 can be used for detecting and solving partial specifications and inconsistencies over event structures.