Behaviour Analysis of Distributed Systems Using the Tracta Approach

摘要

Behaviour analysis should form an integral part of the software development process. This is particularly important in the design of concurrent and distributed systems, where complex interactions can cause unexpected and undesired system behaviour. We advocate the use of a compositional approach to analysis. The software architecture of a distributed program is represented by a hierarchical composition of subsystems, with interacting processes at the leaves of the hierarchy. Compositional reachability analysis (CRA) exploits the compositional hierarchy for incrementally constructing the overall behaviour of the system from that of its subsystems. In the Tracta CRA approach, both processes and properties reflecting system specifications are modelled as state machines. Property state machines are composed into the system and violations are detected on the global reachability graph obtained. The property checking mechanism has been specifically designed to deal with compositional techniques. Tracta is supported by an automated tool compatible with our environment for the development of distributed applications.