Software product line analysis with mCRL2

Abstract

The mCRL2 language and supporting software provide a state-of-the-art tool suite for the verification of distributed systems. In this paper, we present the general principles, extrapolated from [7,8], which make us believe that mCRL2 can also be used for behavioral variability analysis of product families. The mCRL2 data language allows to smoothly deal with feature sets and attributes, its process language is sufficiently rich to model feature selection, as well as product behavior based on an FTS-like semantics. Because of the feature-orientation, our modeling strategy allows a natural refactoring of the semantic model of a product family into a parallel composition of components that reflects coherent sets of features. This opens the way for dedicated abstraction and reduction techniques that strengthen the prospect of a scalable verification approach to software product lines. In this paper, we sketch how to model product families in mCRL2 and how to apply a modular verification method, preparing the ground to further assess the scalability of our approach, in particular regarding model checking.