Alban Linard

New features in CPN-AMI 3: focusing on the analysis of complex distributed systems

Due to the state-space size explosion problem, behavioral analysis techniques are difficult to scale up to industrial size problems. Our group couples research on analysis tools with an introspection on modeling and software engineering techniques. CPN-AMI is an integrated development and analysis environment dedicated to Petri nets. The numerous services it offers are built by a homogeneous integration of tools developed internally, and third-party tools from partner universities. These tools include state of the art algorithms and data-structures. This third major release offers better support for modeling and analysis of very large systems

High-Level Petri Net Model Checking with AlPiNA

Although model checking is heavily used in the hardware domain, it did not take off in software engineering yet. One of the possible reasons is that software models are very complex. They integrate many dimensions such as data types and concurrency, leading to the infamous state space explosion problem. This article introduces the Algebraic Petri Nets Analyzer (AlPiNA), a symbolic model checker for High-level Petri nets. It is comprised of two independent modules: a GUI plug-in for Eclipse and an underlying model checking engine. AlPiNA is a step towards performing efficient and user-friendly model checking of large software systems. This is achieved by separating the model and its properties from the optimisation artifacts. This article describes the features that AlPiNA provides to the user for designing models and verifying properties. It also presents the techniques and artifacts used for tuning verification performance, along with some theoretical background.

Report on the Model Checking Contest at Petri Nets 2011

This article presents the results of the Model Checking Contest held within the SUMo 2011 workshop, a satellite event of Petri Nets 2011. This contest aimed at a fair and experimental evaluation of the performances of model checking techniques applied to Petri nets.

CosyVerif: An Open Source Extensible Verification Environment

CosyVerif aims at gathering within a common framework various existing tools for specification and verification. It has been designed in order to 1) support different formalisms with the ability to easily create new ones, 2) provide a graphical user interface for every formalism, 3) include verification tools called via the graphical interface or via an API as a Web service, and 4) offer the possibility for a developer to integrate his/her own tool without much effort, also allowing it to interact with the other tools. Several tools have already been integrated for the formal verification of (extensions of) Petri nets and timed automata.

polyDD: Towards a Framework Generalizing Decision Diagrams

Decision Diagrams are now widely used in model checking as extremely compact representations of state spaces. Many Decision Diagram categories have been developed over the past twenty years based on the same principles. Each one targets a specific domain with its own characteristics. Moreover, each one provides its own definition. It prevents sharing concepts and techniques between these structures. This paper aims to propose a basis for a common Framework for Decision Diagrams. It should help users of this technology to define new Decision Diagram categories thanks to a simple specification mechanism called Controller. This enables the building of efficient Decision Diagrams dedicated to a given problem.

A Modular Approach for Reusing Formalisms in Verification Tools of Concurrent Systems

Over the past two decades, numerous verification tools have been successfully used for verifying complex concurrent systems, modelled using various formalisms. However, it is still hard to coordinate these tools since they rely on such a large number of formalisms. Having a proper syntactical mechanism to interrelate them through variability would increase the capability of effective integrated formal methods. In this paper, we propose a modular approach for defining new formalisms by reusing existing ones and adding new features and/or constraints. Our approach relies on standard XML technologies; their use provides the capability of rapidly and automatically obtaining tools for representing and validating models. It thus enables fast iterations in developing and testing complex formalisms. As a case study, we applied our modular definition approach on families of Petri nets and timed automata.

Ardoises: Collaborative & Interactive Editing Using Layered Data

Ardoises is a formal modeling platform, that allows its users to collaboratively define formalisms and models of these formalisms. This article presents the algorithm and protocol used for collaborative editing. Its main characteristics are collaborative editing between several users and/or tools, interactivity with low latency through optimistic changes, and optional locking policies. The paper explains the principles, details the editing algorithms, and proves the consistency between all clients.

CREST - A DSL for Reactive Cyber-Physical Systems

This article presents CREST, a novel domain-specific language for the modelling of cyber-physical systems. CREST is designed for the simple and clear modelling, simulation and verification of small-scale systems such as home and office automation, smart gardening systems and similar. The language is designed to model the flow of resources throughout the system. It features synchronous system evolution and reactive behaviour. CREST’s formal semantics allow real-valued time advances and the modelling of timed system evolution. The continuous time concept permits the precise simulation of future system behaviour by automatically calculating next transition times. We present CREST in a practical manner, and elaborate on the Python-based DSL implementation and simulator.

A Model Checker Collection for the Model Checking Contest Using Docker and Machine Learning

This paper introduces mcc4mcc, the Model Checker Collection for the Model Checking Contest, a tool that wraps multiple model checking solutions, and applies the most appropriate one based on the characteristics of the model it is given. It leverages machine learning algorithms to carry out this selection, based on the results gathered from the 2017 edition of the Model Checking Contest, an annual event in which multiple tools compete to verify different properties on a large variety of models. Our approach brings two important contributions. First, our tool offers the opportunity to further investigate on the relation between model characteristics and verification techniques. Second, it lays out the groundwork for a unified way to distribute model checking software using virtual containers.

A Domain Specific Language Approach for Genetic Regulatory Mechanisms Analysis

Systems biology and synthetic biology can be considered as model-driven methodologies. In this context, models are used to discover emergent properties arising from the complex interactions between components. Most available tools propose simulation frameworks to study models of biological systems. Simulation only explores a limited number of behaviors of these models. This may lead to a biased view of the system. On the contrary, model checking explores all the possible behaviors. The use of model checking in the domain of life sciences is limited. It suffers from the complexity of modeling languages designed by and for computer scientists. This article describes an approach based on Domain Specific Languages. It provides a comprehensible, yet formal, language called GReg to describe genetic regulatory mechanisms and their properties, and to apply powerful model checking techniques on them. GReg’s objective is to shelter the user from the complexity of those underlying techniques.