Compositional Verification

Participant : Frédéric Lang.

The CADP toolbox contains various tools dedicated to compositional verification, among which EXP.OPEN, BCG_MIN, BCG_CMP, and SVL play a central role. EXP.OPEN explores on the fly the graph corresponding to a network of communicating automata (represented as a set of BCG files). BCG_MIN and BCG_CMP respectively minimize and compare behavior graphs modulo strong or branching bisimulation and their stochastic extensions. SVL (Script Verification Language) is both a high-level language for expressing complex verification scenarios and a compiler dedicated to this language.

In 2016, the n among m parallel composition operator “par ” of the EXP language has been extended. Before the extension, the set of $m$ processes among which any subset of size $n$ could be synchronized on a given action was necessarily the set of all parallel processes composed by the “par ” operator. From now on, by a slight extension of the syntax, this set of $m$ processes can be defined as a subset of the parallel processes. Also, while $n$ had to be strictly greater than 1, it can now also have value 0 (meaning that none of the $m$ processes can perform the corresponding action) or 1 (meaning that each process can perform the corresponding action on its own, without synchronization). A bug in EXP.OPEN has been fixed and better messages are now emitted to warn the user about dubious usage of the “par ” operator.

The SVL language has been extended to include the extended “par ” operator. Two bugs have also been corrected.

Other Component Developments

Participants : Hubert Garavel, Frédéric Lang, Radu Mateescu, Wendelin Serwe.

Sustained effort was made to improve the documentation of the CADP toolbox. Various corrections have been brought to the CADP manual pages. A 27-page manual page explaining how the LOTOS language is implemented has been written, and the manual pages of the CAESAR and CAESAR.ADT compilers have been also updated. To make documentation more readable, the EVALUATOR3, and EVALUATOR4 manual pages have been splitted each in two parts, so as to better distinguish between the languages (namely, MCL3 and MCL) and their model checkers. The CADP distribution has been made leaner by keeping only the essential papers, and the “publications” and “tutorial” pages of the CADP Web site have been enriched and reorganized.

The conventions for string notations to represent “raw” values (i.e., values whose type is not a predefined one, but a custom type defined by the user) have been improved, together with the associated conversion algorithms for reading/writing raw values from/to strings. The BCG_WRITE manual page has been updated to more accurately describe how label fields of type "raw" are parsed. The behaviour of the functions bcg_character_scan() , bcg_string_scan() , bcg_real_scan() , and bcg_raw_scan() has been carefully revised, and all the BCG libraries and tools (especially BCG_IO) have been modified to follow the new conventions and emit better diagnostics when label fields contain incorrect notations of raw values. Also, BCG_IO has been enhanced so that very long execution sequences can be converted into SEQ or LOTOS files without causing stack overflow.

Finally, enhancements and bug fixes have been brought to other CADP components, including CADP_MEMORY, EUCALYPTUS, INSTALLATOR, OCIS, RFL, TST, and XTL. The style files for the various editors supported by CADP have been updated to take into account the recent features added to LNT. The predefined MCL libraries of the EVALUATOR model checker have been modified to generate more explanatory diagnostics for the inevitability operators.

Although CADP is mostly used on Linux, specific effort has been made to target other execution platforms. Concerning macOS: CADP now supports the recent versions 10.10 (“Yosemite”), 10.11 (“El Capitan”), and 10.12 (“Sierra”). Concerning Windows: changes have been brought to support Windows 10 and the 64-bit version of Cygwin (previously, only the 32-bit version was supported). Other adaptations were required to handle the recent versions of Cygwin packages, MinGW C compiler, and Mintty shell, as well as the case where Cygwin is not installed in “C:\ ”, but in either “C:\Cygwin ” or “C:\Cygwin64 ”.