A Fully Automated Approach to Discovering Nondeterminism in State Machine Diagrams

We present a fully automated technique to detect nondeterminism in state diagrams. Although nondeterminism is a tool often adopted by requirement engineers for specification of a system under development (SUD), it is normally undesirable in actual implementation. Discovering nondeterminism manually is infeasible for industrial-sized systems. Solutions in the literature lack the capability to analyze infinite-state systems. We leverage the nuXmv model checker to analyze unbounded domains and implement an algorithm that systematically computes a minimal set of comparable transitions for the SUD yet eliminates false positives by model checking. To validate our approach, we analyze a real-world system and report discovered cases of nondeterminism. We employ Umple’s capability to convert state machines to nuXmv.