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Section: New Results
New Formal Languages and their Implementations
The ability to compile and verify formal specifications with complex, user-defined operations and data structures is a key feature of the CADP toolbox since its very origins. A long-run effort has been recently undertaken to ensure a uniform treatment of types, values, and functions across all the various CADP tools.
Translation from LNT to LOTOS
Participants : Hubert Garavel, Frédéric Lang, Wendelin Serwe.
LNT is a next generation formal description language for asynchronous concurrent systems, which attempts to combine the best features of imperative programming languages and value-passing process algebras. LNT is increasingly used by CONVECS for industrial case studies and applications (see § 6.5) and serves also in university courses on concurrency, in particular at ENSIMAG (Grenoble) and at Saarland University.
In 2016, the long-term effort to enhance the LNT language and its tools has been pursued. LNT has been enriched with a new statement “use X” that suppresses compiler warnings when a variable X is assigned but not used. The syntax of LNT expressions has been modified so that field selections (“E.X”), field updates (“E1.X = E2”), and array accesses (“E1 [E2]”) can now be freely combined without extra parentheses. LNT programs can now import predefined libraries, and two such libraries (BIT.lnt and OCTET.lnt) have been introduced.
A move towards “safer” LNT exceptions has started. The syntax for exceptions in function declarations has been modified and the semantics of LNT has shifted from “unchecked” to “checked” exceptions: exception parameters, if any, must be explicitly mentioned when a function is called. Such exception parameters can now be passed using either the named style or the positional style.
A few static-semantics constraints have been relaxed; for instance, it is no longer required that actual gate parameters be different when calling a process. Various bugs have been fixed. Several error/warning messages have been made more precise, and the format of LNT error/warning messages has been aligned on that of GCC. Finally, the LNT2LOTOS Reference Manual has been updated and enhanced.
Translation from LOTOS NT to C
Participants : Hubert Garavel, Sai Srikar Kasi, Wendelin Serwe.
The TRAIAN compiler is used to build many compilers and translators of the CADP toolbox. This compiler itself is built using the FNC-2 compiler generator that, unfortunately, is no longer available. For this reason, TRAIAN only exists in 32-bit version, and sometimes hits the 3-4 GByte RAM limit when dealing with complex compilers such as LNT2LOTOS.
In 2016 we addressed this issue, in several steps. As a first step, we released a stable version 2.8 of TRAIAN. Then, we gathered all programs written in LOTOS NT, the input language of TRAIAN, and organized them in non-regression test bases. We entirely scrutinized the source code of TRAIAN, which consists in a large collection of attribute grammars, deleting all parts of code corresponding to those features of the LOTOS NT language that were either not fully implemented or seldom used in practice. This reduced the source code of TRAIAN by and divided by two the size of TRAIAN executables. A few other bugs have been fixed and the reference manual of TRAIAN was entirely revised and updated.
In parallel, we undertook a complete rewrite of TRAIAN to get rid of the FNC-2 deprecated attribute grammar tool. We developed lexical and syntactic descriptions of the input language using the SYNTAX compiler-generation system developed at Inria Paris. The syntax tree of LOTOS NT and the library of predefined LOTOS NT types and functions are now themselves defined in LOTOS NT, as we plan to follow a bootstraping approach, using the current version of TRAIAN to build the next one. To this aim, a large fraction of the TRAIAN attribute grammars has been rewritten in LOTOS NT.
Translation from LOTOS to Petri nets and C
Participants : Hubert Garavel, Wendelin Serwe.
The LOTOS compilers CAESAR and CAESAR.ADT, which were once the flagship of CADP, now play a more discrete role since LNT (rather than LOTOS) has become the recommended specification language of CADP. Thus, CAESAR and CAESAR.ADT are mostly used as back-end translators for LOTOS programs automatically generated from LNT or other formalisms such as Fiacre, and are only modified when this appears to be strictly necessary.
In 2016, following the writing of the new CADP manual page for LOTOS, the common front-end of CAESAR and CAESAR.ADT was carefully inspected, which led to various bug fixes regarding type signatures, error messages for overloaded functions, renaming/actualization of sorts and operations, equations for renamed operations, C-language reserved keywords, implementation of numeral sorts, and iterators over these sorts. Another bug was fixed for the “-external ” option of CAESAR and a new “-numeral ” option was introduced. Also, the C identifiers automatically generated by CAESAR.ADT for sorts, operations, tester and selector macros have been simplified; as the new conventions are not backward compatible, migration tools were developed to ease transitioning the existing LOTOS and C files.
NUPN
Participant : Hubert Garavel.
Nested-Unit Petri Nets (NUPNs) is an upward-compatible extension of P/T nets, which are enriched with structural information on their concurrent structure. Such additional information can easily be produced when NUPNs are generated from higher-level specifications (e.g., process calculi); quite often, such information allows logarithmic reductions in the number of bits required to represent states, thus enabling verification tools to perform better. The principles of NUPNs are exposed in [33] and its PNML representation is described here (http://mcc.lip6.fr/nupn.php).
In 2016, the NUPN principles have been presented in an invited talk at D-CON, the German national conference on concurrency theory. The collection of NUPN models used for experimentation has been enlarged and reorganized; it now contains more than models. A new beta-version of the VLPN (Very Large Petri Nets) benchmark suite, which contains 350 large models has been produced. Also, new prototype tools have been developed that try to convert P/T nets into NUPNs, which requires to automatically infer the concurrent structure of flat, unstructured nets.
The CAESAR.BDD tool that analyzes NUPN models and serves to prepare the yearly Model Checking Contest (http://mcc.lip6.fr/) has been enhanced with two new options “-initial-places ” and “-initial-tokens ”. It now properly handles the case where the initial marking contains more than tokens. The output of the “-mcc ” option has been made more precise when the NUPN under study is conservative or sub-conservative.
Translation from BPMN to LNT
Participants : Gwen Salaün, Ajay Muroor-Nadumane.
Evolution has become a central concern in software development and in particular in business processes, which support the modeling and the implementation of software as workflows of local and inter-process activities. We advocate that business process evolution can be formally analyzed in order to compare different versions of processes, identify precisely the differences between them, and ensure the desired consistency.
In collaboration with Pascal Poizat (LIP6, Paris), we worked on checking the evolution of BPMN processes. To promote its adoption by business process designers, we have implemented it in a tool, VBPMN, that can be used through a Web application. We have defined different kinds of atomic evolutions that can be combined and formally verified. We have defined a BPMN to LNT model transformation, which, using the LTS operational semantics of LNT, enables us to automate our approach using existing LTS model checking and equivalence checking tools, such as those provided by CADP. We have applied our approach to many examples for evaluation purposes. These results have been published in an international conference [23].
Translation from GRL to LNT
Participants : Hubert Garavel, Fatma Jebali, Jingyan Jourdan-Lu, Frédéric Lang, Eric Léo, Radu Mateescu, Wendelin Serwe.
In the context of the Bluesky project (see § 8.2.2.1), we study the formal modeling of GALS (Globally Asynchronous, Locally Synchronous) systems, which are composed of several synchronous subsystems evolving cyclically, each at its own pace, and communicating with each other asynchronously. Designing GALS systems is challenging due to both the high level of (synchronous and asynchronous) concurrency and the heterogeneity of computations (deterministic and nondeterministic). To bring our formal verification techniques and tools closer to the GALS paradigm, we designed a new formal language named GRL (GALS Representation Language), as an intermediate format between GALS models and purely asynchronous concurrent models. GRL combines the main features of synchronous dataflow programming and asynchronous process calculi into one unified language, while keeping the syntax homogeneous for better acceptance by industrial GALS designers. GRL allows a modular composition of synchronous systems (blocks), environmental constraints (environments), and asynchronous communication mechanisms (mediums), to be described at a level of abstraction that is appropriate to verification. GRL also supports external C and LNT code. A translator named GRL2LNT has been developed, allowing an LNT program to be generated from a GRL specification automatically. Additionally, an OPEN/CAESAR-compliant compiler named GRL.OPEN (based on GRL2LNT and LNT.OPEN) enables the on-the-fly exploration of the LTS underlying a GRL specification using CADP.
In 2016, a new version 3.3 of the GRL2LNT translator has been released, with an improved LNT code generation exploiting the “use ” construct newly added to LNT. Also, a non-regression test base containing hundreds of GRL specifications has been set up. This also contributes to the non-regression testing of the compilation chain for LNT by providing new LNT descriptions generated automatically by GRL2LNT.
An overview paper about GRL and its translation to LNT was published in an international journal [14]. The complete definition of GRL and its applications to GALS systems are available in F. Jebali's PhD thesis [44].
Translation of Term Rewrite Systems
Participants : Hubert Garavel, Lina Marsso, Mohammad-Ali Tabikh.
In 2016, we pursued the development undertaken in 2015 of a software platform for systematically comparing the performance of rewrite engines and pattern-matching implementations in algebraic specification and functional programming languages. Our platform reuses the benchmarks of the three Rewrite Engine Competitions (2006, 2009, and 2010). Such benchmarks are term-rewrite systems expressed in a simple formalism named REC, for which we developed automated translators that convert REC benchmarks into various languages.
In 2016, we corrected a number of benchmarks and added many new ones, to reach a total of 85 benchmarks in December 2016. Among these new benchmarks, one can mention a formalization of arithmetic operations on signed integers, a collection of (8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit) binary adders and multipliers, and a complete model of the MAA (“Message Authenticator Algorithm”), a Message Authentication Code used for financial transactions (ISO 8731-2) between 1987 and 2002.
The existing translators (for Haskell, LOTOS, Maude, mCRL, OCAML, Opal, Rascal, Scala, SML-NJ, and Tom) have been enhanced and new translators (for AProVE, Clean, LNT, MLTON, Stratego/XT) have been developed. Tools for automatically extracting and synthesizing performance statistics have also been developed.