Behaviour Analysis of Distributed Systems Using the Tracta Approach

  • Authors:
  • Dimitra Giannakopoulou;Jeff Kramer;Shing Chi Cheung

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computing, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London SW7 2BZ, UK. dg1@doc.ic.ac.uk;Department of Computing, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London SW7 2BZ, UK. jk@doc.ic.ac.uk;Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong. scc@cs.ust.hk

  • Venue:
  • Automated Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Behaviour analysis should form an integral part of the softwaredevelopment process. This is particularly important in thedesign of concurrent and distributed systems, where complexinteractions can cause unexpected and undesired systembehaviour. We advocate the use of a compositional approach toanalysis. The software architecture of a distributed program isrepresented by a hierarchical composition of subsystems, withinteracting processes at the leaves of the hierarchy.Compositional reachability analysis (CRA) exploits thecompositional hierarchy for incrementally constructing theoverall behaviour of the system from that of its subsystems. Inthe Tracta CRA approach, both processes and propertiesreflecting system specifications are modelled as state machines.Property state machines are composed into the system andviolations are detected on the global reachability graphobtained. The property checking mechanism has been specificallydesigned to deal with compositional techniques. Tracta issupported by an automated tool compatible with our environmentfor the development of distributed applications.