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Section: Software
SOFAT
Participants : Loïc Hélouët [correspondant] , Rouwaida Abdallah.
SOFAT is the acronym for Scenario Oracle and Formal Analysis Toolbox. As this name suggests it is a formal analysis toolbox for scenarios. Scenarios are informal descriptions of behaviors of distributed systems. SOFAT allows the edition and analysis of distributed systems specifications described using Message Sequence Charts, a scenario language standardized by the ITU [Z.120]. The main functionalities proposed by SOFAT are the textual edition of Message Sequence Charts, their graphical visualization, the analysis of their formal properties, and their simulation. The analysis of the formal properties of a Message Sequence Chart specification determines if a description is regular, local choice, or globally cooperative. Satisfaction of these properties allow respectively for model-checking of logical formulae in temporal logic, implementation, or comparison of specifications. All these applications are either undecidable problems or unfeasible if the Message Sequence Chart description does not satisfy the corresponding property. The SOFAT toolbox implements most of the theoretical results obtained on Message Sequence Charts this last decade. It is regularly updated and re-distributed. The purpose of this software is twofold:
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Provide a scenario based specification tool for developers of distributed applications
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Serve as a platform for theoretical results on scenarios and partial orders
SOFAT provides several functionalities, that are: syntactical analysis of scenario descriptions, Formal analysis of scenario properties, Interactive Simulation of scenarios when possible, and diagnosis. This year, SOFAT was extended with code synthesis functionalities, allowing to generate communicating automata, promela code, or rest based web services from HMSCs. A new release of the software is expected before the end of the year.
See also the web page http://www.irisa.fr/distribcom/Prototypes/SOFAT/index.html .