Automated model repair for Alloy

Wang, Kaiyuan; Sullivan, Allison; Khurshid, Sarfraz

doi:10.1145/3238147.3238162

Cited by 34 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…We evaluate Reach over a benchmark of Alloy models collected from recent advancements made to Alloy [20,35,4]. We address the following research questions in this section:…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

REACH: Refining Alloy Scenarios by Scope

Jovanović¹,

Sullivan²

2021

Preprint

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Writing declarative models has numerous benefits, ranging from automated reasoning and correction of design-level properties before systems are built, to automated testing and debugging of their implementations after they are built. Alloy is a declarative modeling language that is well suited for verifying system designs. A key strength of Alloy is its scenario-finding toolset, the Analyzer, which allows users to explore all valid scenarios that adhere to the model's constraints up to a user-provided scope. In Alloy, it is common for users to desire to first validate smaller scenarios, then once confident, move onto validating larger scenarios. However, the Analyzer only presents scenarios in the order they are discovered by the SAT solver. This paper presents Reach, an extension to the Analyzer which allows users to explore scenarios by size. Experimental results reveal Reach's enumeration improves performance while having the added benefit of maintaining a semi-sorted ordering of scenarios for the user. Moreover, we highlight Reach's ability to improve the performance of Alloy's analysis when the user makes incremental changes to the scope of the enumeration. Reach is available at: https://reachenumerator.github.io/

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“…We evaluate Reach over a benchmark of Alloy models collected from recent advancements made to Alloy [20,35,4]. We address the following research questions in this section:…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

REACH: Refining Alloy Scenarios by Scope

Jovanović¹,

Sullivan²

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…The second subject set is called Real Version Set. Each subject in this set consists of two model versions: the real faulty model (version 1) from the ARepair [26] distribution and the correct model after the fix (version 2). There are 36 subjects in this set.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This set includes 24 base Alloy models and 5 mutant versions for each base model. The other set, termed real version set, uses base Alloy models that had real faults and were repaired using the ARepair [25,26] tool for fixing faulty Alloy models. For each faulty base model, its evolution is the corresponding fixed model.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incremental Analysis of Evolving Alloy Models

Wang

Gligoric

et al. 2019

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

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Alloy is a well-known tool-set for building and analyzing software designs and models. Alloy's key strengths are its intuitive notation based on relational logic, and its powerful analysis engine backed by propositional satisfiability (SAT) solvers to help users find subtle design flaws. However, scaling the analysis to the designs of real-world systems remains an important technical challenge. This paper introduces a new approach, iAlloy, for more efficient analysis of Alloy models. Our key insight is that users often make small and frequent changes and repeatedly run the analyzer when developing Alloy models, and the development cost can be reduced with the incremental analysis over these changes. iAlloy is based on two techniques-a static technique based on a lightweight impact analysis and a dynamic technique based on solution re-use-which in many cases helps avoid potential costly SAT solving. Experimental results show that iAlloy significantly outperforms Alloy analyzer in the analysis of evolving Alloy models with more than 50% reduction in SAT solver calls on average, and up to 7x speedup.

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“…The rest of the parameters in q are exactly the same as the parameters in the Acyclic predicate. The body of the predicate q states how the parameter h determines the value of the quali er hole: if h is Q_All, then the quanti er hole is "all" (lines 9-10), and similarly for "some" (lines [11][12] and "no" (lines [13][14]. Any reference to a declared signature or eld is replaced by the corresponding parameter in predicate q, e.g., "List.header.…”

Section: Synthesizermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Alloy is a wellknown modeling languages which comes with an automatic SATbased analyzer [13] that performs analysis using a bounded scope on the universe of discourse. Over the past few years, many Alloy extensions have been developed [3,4,14,17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

ASketch: a sketching framework for Alloy

Wang

Sullivan

Marinov

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of

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Alloy is a declarative modeling language that supports rst-order logic with transitive closure. Alloy has been used in a variety of domains to model software systems and nd design de ciencies. However, it is often challenging to make an Alloy model correct or to debug a faulty Alloy model. ASketch is a sketching/synthesis technique that can help users write correct Alloy models. ASketch allows users to provide a partial Alloy model with holes, a generator that speci es candidate fragments to be considered for each hole, and a set of tests that capture the desired model properties. Then, the tool completes the holes such that all tests for the completed model pass. ASketch uses tests written for the recently introduced AUnit framework, which provides a foundation of testing (unit tests, test execution, and model coverage) for Alloy models in the spirit of traditional unit testing. This paper describes our Java implementation of ASketch, which is a command-line tool, released as an open-source project on GitHub. Our experimental results show that ASketch can handle partial Alloy models with multiple holes and a large search space. The demo video for ASketch can be found at https://youtu.be/T5NIVsV329E.

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Automated model repair for Alloy

Cited by 34 publications

References 73 publications

REACH: Refining Alloy Scenarios by Scope

REACH: Refining Alloy Scenarios by Scope

Incremental Analysis of Evolving Alloy Models

ASketch: a sketching framework for Alloy

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