Improving lazy abstraction for SCR specifications through constraint relaxation

Degiovanni, Renzo; Ponzio, Pablo; Aguirre, Nazareno; Frías, Marcelo

Artículo de Publicación Periódica:
Improving lazy abstraction for SCR specifications through constraint relaxation

dc.contributor.author	Degiovanni, Renzo
dc.contributor.author	Ponzio, Pablo
dc.contributor.author	Aguirre, Nazareno
dc.contributor.author	Frías, Marcelo
dc.date.accessioned	2020-06-26T20:09:54Z
dc.date.available	2020-06-26T20:09:54Z
dc.date.issued	2018-03
dc.description.abstract	"Formal requirements specifications, eg, software cost reduction (SCR) specifications, are challenging to analyse using automated techniques such as model checking. Since such specifications are meant to capture requirements, they tend to refer to real-world magnitudes often characterized through variables over large domains. At the same time, they feature a high degree of nondeterminism, as opposed to other analysis contexts such as (sequential) program verification. This makes model checking of SCR specifications difficult even for symbolic approaches. Moreover, automated abstraction refinement techniques such as counterexample guided abstraction refinement fail in many cases in this context, since the concrete state space is typically large, and reaching specific states of interest may require complex executions involving many different states, causing these approaches to perform many abstraction refinements, and making them ineffective in practice. In this paper, an approach to tackle the above situation, through a 2-stage abstraction, is presented. The specification is first relaxed, by disregarding the constraints imposed in the specification by physical laws or by the environment, before being fed to a counterexample guided abstraction refinement procedure, tailored to SCR. By relaxing the original specification, shorter spurious counterexamples are produced, favouring the abstraction refinement through the introduction of fewer abstraction predicates. Then, when a counterexample is concretizable with respect to the relaxed (concrete) specification but it is spurious with respect to the original specification, an efficient though incomplete refinement step is applied to the constraints, to cause the removal of the spurious case. This approach is experimentally assessed, comparing it with related techniques in the verification of properties and in automated test case generation, using various SCR specifications drawn from the literature as case studies. The experiments show that this new approach runs faster and scales better to larger, more complex specifications than related techniques."	en
dc.identifier.issn	0960-0833
dc.identifier.uri	http://ri.itba.edu.ar/handle/123456789/2228
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.relation	info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1002/stvr.1657
dc.relation	info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ANPCyT/PICT/2012-1298/AR. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires
dc.relation	info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ANPCyT/PICT/2013-2624/AR. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires
dc.relation	info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ANPCyT/PICT/2015-2341/AR. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires
dc.relation	info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ANPCyT/PICT/2015-2088/AR. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires
dc.relation	info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/QNRF/NPRP/4-1109-1-174/QA. Doha
dc.subject	ESPECIFICACIONES	es
dc.subject	INGENIERIA DE SOFTWARE	es
dc.subject	VERIFICACION DE SOFTWARE	es
dc.title	Improving lazy abstraction for SCR specifications through constraint relaxation	en
dc.type	Artículos de Publicaciones Periódicas	es
dc.type	info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion
dspace.entity.type	Artículo de Publicación Periódica
itba.description.filiation	Fil: Degiovanni, Renzo. Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físico-Químicas y Naturales; Argentina.
itba.description.filiation	Fil: Degiovanni, Renzo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina.
itba.description.filiation	Fil: Ponzio, Pablo. Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físico-Químicas y Naturales; Argentina.
itba.description.filiation	Fil: Ponzio, Pablo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina.
itba.description.filiation	Fil: Aguirre, Nazareno. Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físico-Químicas y Naturales; Argentina.
itba.description.filiation	Fil: Aguirre, Nazareno. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina.
itba.description.filiation	Fil: Frías, Marcelo. Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires; Argentina.
itba.description.filiation	Fil: Frías, Marcelo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina.