TREM: A tool for mining timed regular specifications from system traces

Abstract

Software specifications are useful for software validation, model checking, runtime verification, debugging, monitoring, etc. In context of safety-critical real-time systems, temporal properties play an important role. However, temporal properties are rarely present due to the complexity and evolutionary nature of software systems. We propose Timed Regular Expression Mining (TREM) a hosted tool for specification mining using timed regular expressions (TREs). It is designed for easy and robust mining of dominant temporal properties. TREM uses an abstract structure of the property; the framework constructs a finite state machine to serve as an acceptor. TREM is scalable, easy to access/use, and platform independent specification mining framework. The tool is tested on industrial strength software system traces such as the QNX real-time operating system using traces with more than 1.5 Million entries. The tool demonstration video can be accessed here: youtu.be/cSd_aj3_LH8