Specification and verification of event detectors and responses

Abstract

Events and aspects that respond to them can and should be defined, specified, and verified in a modular way, as an aid in understanding and guaranteeing the correctness of each on its own. However, finding the appropriate interfaces and abstractions and expressing them precisely is not an easy task. Moreover, formally verifying large models is often unfeasible for existing model-checking tools. We present an abstraction refinement scheme to verify aspects and to define and correct both aspect and event specifications. This allows considering smaller models and learning the needed event guarantees at each step. In addition, this technique can be used to find sound abstractions to check event reachability. Moreover, the technique is applied for detecting interference in systems where there are responses to complex events and aspects may be activated within the execution of other aspects.