Formal verification of user-level real-time property patterns

To ease the expression of real-time requirements, Dwyer, and then Konrad, studied a large collection of existing systems in order to identify a set of real-time property patterns covering most of the useful use cases. The goal was to provide a set of reusable patterns that system designers can instantiate to express requirements instead of using complex temporal logic formulas. A limitation of this approach is that the choice of patterns is more oriented towards expressiveness than efficiency; meaning that it does not take into account the computational complexity of checking patterns. For this purpose, we define a set of verification-dedicated, atomic property patterns for qualitative and quantitative real-time requirements. End-user requirements can then be expressed as a composition of these patterns using a predefined meta-model and a mapping library. These properties can be checked efficiently using a set of elementary observers and a model checking approach.