The ABS tool suite: modelling, executing and analysing distributed adaptable object-oriented systems

Abstract

Abstract. Modern software systems must support a high degree of variability to accommodate a wide range of requirements and operating conditions. This paper introduces the Abstract Behavioural Specification (ABS) language and tool suite, a comprehensive platform for developing and analysing highly adaptable distributed concurrent software systems. The ABS language has a hybrid functional and object-oriented core, and comes with extensions that support the development of systems that are adaptable to diversified requirements, yet capable to maintain a high level of trustworthiness. Using ABS, system variability is consistently traceable from the level of requirements engineering down to object behaviour. This facilitates temporal evolution, as changes to the required set of features of a system are automatically reflected by functional adaptation of the system's behaviour. The analysis capabilities of ABS stretch from debugging, observing and simulating to resource analysis of ABS models and help ensure that a system will remain dependable throughout its evolutionary lifetime. We report on the experience of using the ABS language and the ABS tool suite in an industrial case study.

Run-Time Verification of Coboxes

“…ABS is basically an extension of the modeling language considered in this paper. It is tool-supported by various analysis tools [21] and automated code generation has been implemented to various lower-level languages including Java, Maude and Scala. SAGA tests whether an actual execution of a given ABS model satisfies its specification given by attribute grammars, and stops the running program in case of a violation to prevent unsafe behavior.…”

“…The output is an ordinary ABS model which behaves the same as the input program, except that it throws an assertion failure when the current execution violates the specification. Since the resulting ABS model is an ordinary ABS model, all analysis tools [21] (including a debugging environment with visualization and a state-of-the-art cost analyzer) and back-ends which exist for the ABS can be used on it directly. The third requirement (a separation of concerns between the parser-generator and the rest of the implementation) has lead to a component-based design (Figure 8) consisting of a parser-generator component and source-code weaving component.…”

Deadlock Analysis of Concurrent Objects: Theory and Practice

“…5 The SDA tool and its application to the case study ABS (and, therefore, core ABS) comes with a suite [25] that offers a compilation framework, a set of tools to analyze the code, an Eclipse IDE plugin and Emacs mode for the language. We extended this suite with an implementation of our static deadlock analysis tool (SDA tool), available at http://cs.unibo.it/~laneve/ deadlock.…”

Software diversity: state of the art and perspectives

“…The article "The ABS Tool Suite: Modeling, Executing and Analysing Distributed Adaptable ObjectOriented Systems" [225] by Wong et al mainly concerns the design and implementation of diverse software systems which is reviewed in Sections 3 and 4. The authors provide an overview of the Abstract Behavioral Specification (ABS) language and tool suite, which is a comprehensive platform for developing highly adaptive, distributed and concurrent software systems.…”