Model-checking Erlang: a comparison between EtomCRL2 and McErlang

  • Authors:

  • Qiang Guo;John Derrick;Clara Benac Earle;Lars-Åke Fredlund

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, The University of Sheffield, UK;Department of Computer Science, The University of Sheffield, UK;Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain;Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

  • Venue:
  • TAIC PART'10 Proceedings of the 5th international academic and industrial conference on Testing - practice and research techniques
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Model-checking programs is important in the development of a reliable software system. Two approaches might be applied to model-check a system at a source code level. One is to directly apply model-checking algorithm to the programming language; the other to abstract the program source codes into a formal specification, upon which some standard model-checkers can be used to verify system's properties. Both methods have recently been investigated for model-checking the functional programming language Erlang. Correspondingly, two Erlang model-checkers McErlang and Etomcrl2 are developed. This paper evaluates the two model-checkers by applying them to verify a a distributed and concurrent example - telecoms implemented in Erlang/OTP. A number of system's key properties are model-checked with both tool-sets. Advantages and disadvantages upon the uses of Etomcrl2 and McErlang are compared and summarized. Through such a case study, we intend to evaluate the two model-checkers on their effectiveness when verifying distributed and concurrent systems, and propose suggestions for their future work.