The formal semantics of SDL-2000: Status and perspectives

Glässer, Uwe; Gotzhein, Reinhard; Prinz, Andreas

doi:10.1016/s1389-1286(03)00247-0

Cited by 47 publications

(21 citation statements)

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“…This effort can build upon the use that has been made of ASM ground models to formulate industrial standards, e.g. for the forthcoming standard of the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services [67], for the ITU-T standard for SDL-2000 [40], for the de facto standard for Java and the Java Virtual Machine [64], the ECMA standard for C# and the .NET CLR [17,62], the IEEE-VHDL93 standard [18]. This effort is certainly a long-term endeavor, but it appears to us to be both feasible and necessary to formulate the technical content of software reliability for embedded systems.…”

Section: A Research Challenge and Some Milestones Aheadmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linking the Meaning of Programs to What the Compiler Can Verify

Börger

2008

Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments

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Abstract. We formulate some research and development challenges that relate what a verifying compiler can verify to the definition and analysis of the application-content of programs, where the analysis comprises both experimental validation and mathematical verification. We also point to a practical framework to deal with theses challenges, namely the Abstract State Machines (ASM) method for high-level system design and analysis. We explain how it allows one to bridge the gap between informal requirements and detailed code by combining application-centric experimentally validatable system modeling with mathematically verifiable refinements of abstract models to compiler-verifiable code.This paper is a position paper, triggered by the formulation of the program verifier challenge in [46]. By its definition, Hoare's challenge is focussed on the correctness of programs: software representations of computer-based systems, tobe-compiled by a verifying compiler. As a consequence, "the criterion of correctness is specified by types, assertions and other redundant annotations associated with the code of the program", where "the compiler will work in combination with other program development and testing tools, to achieve any desired degree of confidence in the structural soundness of the system and the total correctness of its more critical components." [46] Compilable code however is the result of two program development activities, which have to be checked too:-turning the requirements into ground models, accurate "blueprints" of the to-be-implemented piece of "real world", which define the application-centric meaning of programs in an abstract and precise form, prior to coding, -linking ground models to compilable code by a series of refinements, which introduce step by step the details resulting from the design decisions for the implementation.We propose to broaden the program verifier challenge by relating the verification of the correctness for compilable programs to the experimental validation of the application-domain-based semantical correctness for ground models and to the mathematical verification of their refinements to compilable code, using Abstract State Machine (ASM) ground models [11] (Sect. 1) and ASM refinements [12] (Sect. 2). This leads us to formulate a broadening of Hoare's challenge, together with a series of milestones towards the overall goal (Sect. 4).

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Section: A Research Challenge and Some Milestones Aheadmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linking the Meaning of Programs to What the Compiler Can Verify

Börger

2008

Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments

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“…It encourages the well-structured design of both programming languages and program logics. For instance, the semantics definition of the Specification and Description Language 2000 (SDL-2000) -introduced in the following section -is defined by means of a translation [GGP03] from an SDL program to an Abstract State Machine (ASM) program [Gur88]. The latter three semantic description styles are formal as they are founded on a strong mathematical basis.…”

Section: • Axiomatic Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For the definition of the syntax, semantics and the properties of SDL, different metalanguages according to their strengths have been used with respect to the particular needs [GGP03]. The SDL language definition consists of the following parts:…”

Section: Language Conceptmentioning

confidence: 99%

A UML Profile for Communicating Systems

Werner

Kraatz

Hogrefe

2006

System Analysis and Modeling: Language Profiles

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This thesis presents a new Unified Modeling Language 2 (UML AcknowledgmentsI am grateful to my supervisor Prof. Dr. Hogrefe for many fruitful and helpful discussions in the stimulating atmosphere of his research group. I also thank my co-supervisor Prof. Dr. Grabowski for accepting the task of examining this thesis.Many thanks go out to all my colleagues from the Institute of Informatics at the University of Göttingen. Especially, I am grateful to my colleagues Michael Ebner, Rene Soltwisch and Xiaoming Fu for useful and valuable discussions on formal modeling techniques.I also thank my students Julia Woch and Sebastian Kraatz for contributing to this work with their considerable efforts. This thesis would not be in its current shape without the comments of numerous people. I thank Omar Alfandi, Mohammed Alfandi, Andrea Hellner, Ingo Juchem, Helmut Neukirchen, Katharina and Peter Samow for reading this thesis, finding errors and providing helpful suggestions for improving this thesis. List of Figures IntroductionDue to the huge complexity of modern software systems, it is required to specify precisely what a software component should do and how it should behave. If the final implementation deviates from the expected behavior, its use or its communication with other software components may fail. In a software development process, the specification describes the expected behavior of the software; the description describes the actual behavior of that software. The actual behavior is the implementation. A specification is a technical contract between developers and users or clients. It is mainly intended to provide them with a mutual understanding of the software and is used to guide the development and the use. This also applies for the development of communicating protocols as they are merely implemented in software.Today, most protocol specifications are carried out in natural, informal language because it is easy to understand. However, experience has shown that specifications in natural languages can be vague, verbose and ambiguous. That means they can be interpreted in more than one way. A specification is formal if its meaning (its semantics) is unambiguous. Special languages, known as formal description techniques (FDTs), have been developed for the unambiguous specification and description of software. Hence, FDTs are distinguished from formal languages by having a formal syntax and a formal semantics. This stands in contrast to (semi-)formal languages such as Java or C++ which only have a formal syntax. FDTs are based on rigorous formal methods and offer the means for defining unambiguous specifications of network services and protocols in a more comprehensive and precise way than those done in natural language. In addition, they provide a basis for analysis, verification and validation of a specification before protocols are implemented. They can be used at the requirement stage to capture the user requirements. During the stage of analysis and design, FDTs can be used to describe abstract...

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“…See the formulation of the forthcoming standard for the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services [52], for the ITU-T standard for SDL-2000 [35], the ECMA standard for C# [17], the de facto standard for Java and its implementation on the JVM [51], the IEEE-VHDL93 standard [18], the ISO-Prolog standard [14]. Or see the development of railway [13,19] and mobile telephony network components [25] at Siemens.…”

Section: Asm Ground Models (System Blueprints)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The ASM Method for System Design and Analysis. A Tutorial Introduction

Börger

2005

Frontiers of Combining Systems

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Abstract. We introduce into and survey the ASM method for highlevel system design and analysis. We explain the three notions|Abstract State Machine [37], ASM ground model (system blueprint) [7] and ASM re nement [8]|that characterize the method, which integrates also current validation and veri cation techniques. We illustrate how the method allows the system engineer to rigorously capture requirements by ASM ground models and to stepwise re ne these to code in a validatable and veri able way. Scope and Achievements of the ASM MethodAn outstanding feature of the ASM method is that within a single precise yet simple conceptual framework, it naturally supports and uniformly integrates the following activities and techniques, as illustrated by requirements capture by constructing rigorous ground models, i.e. accurate concise high-level system blueprints (system contracts), formulated in domain-speci c terms, using an application-oriented language which can be understood by all stakeholders [7], architectural and component design bridging the gap between speci cation and code by piecemeal, systematically documented detailing of abstract models via stepwise re ned models to code [8], validation of models by their tool-supported simulation, veri cation of model properties by tool-supported proof techniques, documentation for inspection, reuse and maintenance by providing, through the intermediate models and their analysis, explicit descriptions of the software structure and of the major design decisions, { the principal modeling and analysis techniques, on the basis of a systematic separation of di erent concerns (e.g. design from analysis, orthogonal design decisions, multiple levels of de nitional or proof detail, etc.):integrating dynamic (operational) and static (declarative) descriptions, combining validation (simulation) and veri cation (proof) methods at any desired level of detail.

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The formal semantics of SDL-2000: Status and perspectives

Cited by 47 publications

References 1 publication

Linking the Meaning of Programs to What the Compiler Can Verify

Linking the Meaning of Programs to What the Compiler Can Verify

A UML Profile for Communicating Systems

The ASM Method for System Design and Analysis. A Tutorial Introduction

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