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Interactive state-space analysis of concurrent systems

Journal Article · · IEEE Trans. Software Eng.; (United States)

The introduction of concurrency into programs has added to the complexity of the software design process. This is most evident in the design of communications protocols where concurrency is inherent to the behavior of the system. The complexity exhibited by such software systems makes more evident the need for computer-aided tools for automatically analyzing behavior. The Distributed Systems project at UCI has been developing techniques and tools, based on Petri nets, which support the design and evaluation of concurrent software systems. Techniques based on constructing reachability graphs that represent projections and selections of complete state-spaces have been developed. This paper focuses attention on the computer-aided analysis of these graphs for the purpose of proving correctness of the modeled system. The application of the analysis technique to evaluating simulation results for correctness is discussed. The tool which supports this analysis (the reachability graph analyzer, RGA) is also described. This tool provides mechanisms for proving general system properties (e.g., deadlock-freeness) as well as system-specific properties. The tool is sufficiently general to allow a user to apply complex user-defined analysis algorithms to reachability graphs. The alternating-bit protocol, with a bounded channel, is used to demonstrate the power of the tool and to point to future extensions.

Research Organization:
Dept. of Information and Computer Science, Univ. of California, Irvine, CA 92717 (US)
OSTI ID:
5090936
Journal Information:
IEEE Trans. Software Eng.; (United States), Journal Name: IEEE Trans. Software Eng.; (United States) Vol. SE-13:10; ISSN IESED
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English