Adaptive model learning for continual verification of non-functional properties

Abstract

A growing number of business and safety-critical services are delivered by computer systems designed to reconfigure in response to changes in workloads, requirements and internal state. In recent work, we showed how a formal technique called continual verification can be used to ensure that such systems continue to satisfy their reliability and performance requirements as they evolve, and we presented the challenges associated with the new technique. In this paper, we address important instances of two of these challenges, namely the maintenance of up-to-date reliability models and the adoption of continual verification in engineering practice. To address the first challenge, we introduce a new method for learning the parameters of the reliability models from observations of the system behaviour. This method is capable of adapting to variations in the frequency of the available system observations, yielding faster and more accurate learning than existing solutions. To tackle the second challenge, we present a new software engineering tool that enables developers to use our adaptive learning and continual verification in the area of service-based systems, without a formal verification background and with minimal effort.