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Section: New Results

Parallel and Distributed Verification

Distributed State Space Manipulation

Participant : Wendelin Serwe.

For distributed verification, CADP provides the PBG format, which implements the theoretical concept of Partitioned LTS  [44] and provides a unified access to an LTS distributed over a set of remote machines.

In 2018, we improved the usability of distributed state space manipulation tools. In particular:

  • A memory shortage error that occurs on a computing node now triggers a distributed termination of the computation, producing proper error messages in the log file of that node.

  • A similar naming scheme for log files produced by computing nodes was enforced for all distributed verification tools, which prevents interferences between different invocations of the tools.

Debugging of Concurrent Systems using Counterexample Analysis

Participants : Gianluca Barbon, Gwen Salaün.

Model checking is an established technique for automatically verifying that a model satisfies a given temporal property. When the model violates the property, the model checker returns a counterexample, which is a sequence of actions leading to a state where the property is not satisfied. Understanding this counterexample for debugging the specification is a complicated task for several reasons: (i) the counterexample can contain hundreds of actions, (ii) the debugging task is mostly achieved manually, (iii) the counterexample does not explicitly highlight the source of the bug that is hidden in the model, (iv) the most relevant actions are not highlighted in the counterexample, and (v) the counterexample does not give a global view of the problem.

We proposed an approach that improves the usability of model checking by simplifying the comprehension of counterexamples. Our solution aims at keeping only actions in counterexamples that are relevant for debugging purposes. This is achieved by detecting in the models some specific choices between transitions leading to a correct behaviour or falling into an erroneous part of the model. These choices, which we call “neighbourhoods”, provide key information for understanding the bug behind the counterexample. To extract such choices, we proposed a first method for debugging the counterexamples of safety property violations. To do so, it builds a new model from the original one containing all the counterexamples, and then compares the two models to identify neighbourhoods.

In 2018, we proposed a different method for debugging the counterexamples of liveness property violations. Given a liveness property, it extends the model with prefix and suffix information w.r.t. that property. This enriched model is then analysed to identify neighbourhoods. A set of abstraction techniques we developed exploit the enriched model annotated with neighbourhoods to extract relevant actions from counterexamples, which makes their comprehension easier. This work led to a publication in an international conference [16].

Both approaches are fully automated by a tool we implemented and that has been validated on real-world case studies from various application areas. We extended the methodology and tool with 3D visualization techniques to visualize the erroneous part of the model with a specific focus on neighbourhoods, in order to have a global view of the bug behaviour. This work led to a publication to appear in an international conference.

A detailed description of the proposed methodology is available in G. Barbon's PhD thesis  [8].