PSPWizard: machine-assisted definition of temporal logical properties with specification patterns

Model checking provides a powerful means to assert and verify desired system properties. But, for the verification process to become feasible, a correct formulation of these properties in a temporal logic is necessary - a potential barrier to application in practice. Research on property specification has supplied us with rich pattern catalogs that capture commonly occurring system properties in different temporal logics. Furthermore, these property specification pattern catalogs usually offer both a structured English grammar to facilitate the pattern selection and an associated template solutions to express the properties formally. Yet, the actual use of property specification patterns remains cumbersome, due to limited tool support. For this reason, we have developed the Property Specification Pattern Wizard (PSPWizard), a framework that defines an interface for the currently accepted property specification pattern libraries. PSPWizard consists of two main building blocks: a mapping generator that weaves a given pattern library with a target logic and a GUI front-end to the structured English grammar tailored to those patterns that are supported in the target logic.