Towards an Alloy Formal Model for Flexible Advanced Transactional Model Development

Abstract

SPLACID is a semi-formal language conceived for the specification and synthesis of (advanced) transactional models from basic features, such as transaction types and (relaxed) ACID variants. SPLACID is an improvement of the ACTA framework offering a well-structured and formal syntax. Neither ACTA nor SPLACID, however, benefit from a formal tool-supported semantics. This paper presents the first step for having a full formal semantics of SPLACID by translation to Alloy. In particular, we present the translation of the SPLACID concepts into Alloy concepts focusing on those concepts pertaining to the structure of a Transactional Model and those characterizing the isolation variant. The Alloy specification obtained by this translation preserve the SPLACID main key-properties, namely, modularity, flexibility and reusability. To support this claim we show how flexible, modular and reusable structures and isolation variants can be obtained in Alloy. Finally, we analyze the flat and nested transactional model structures and the serializability-based isolation variant using the Alloy Analyzer.