Incremental component-based construction and verification using invariants

Abstract

We propose invariant-based techniques for the efficient verification of safety and deadlock properties of concurrent systems. We assume that components and component interactions are described within the BIP framework, a tool for component-based design. We build on a compositional methodology in which the invariant is obtained by combining the invariants of the individual components with an interaction invariant that takes concurrency and interaction between components into account. In this paper, we propose new efficient techniques for computing interaction invariants. This is achieved in several steps. First, we propose a formalization of incremental component-based design. Then we suggest sufficient conditions that ensure the preservation of invariants through the introduction of new interactions. For cases in which these conditions are not satisfied, we propose methods for generation of new invariants in an incremental manner. The reuse of existing invariants reduces considerably the verification effort. Our techniques have been implemented in the D-Finder toolset. Among the experiments conducted, we have been capable of verifying properties and deadlock-freedom of DALA, an autonomous robot whose behaviors in the functional level are described with 500000 lines of C Code. This experiment, which is conducted with industrial partners, is far beyond the scope of existing academic tools such as NuSMV or SPIN.