Abstract Context-Sensitive Visibility.pdfVIP

Valmari, Virtanen, and Puhakka Context-Sensitive Visibility Antti Valmari 1, Heikki Virtanen 2 and Antti Puhakka 3 Institute of Software Systems Tampere University of Technology Tampere, Finland This text appeared as Antti Valmari, Heikki Virtanen Antti Puhakka: “Context-Sensitive Visibility”. Proc. FMICS’02, Seventh International Work- shop on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems, July 12–13, Malaga, Spain, also: Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 66 No. 2 (2002), Elsevier Science, 17 p. The copyright of this text belongs to Elsevier. 1 Email: ava@cs.tut.fi 2 Email: hvi@cs.tut.fi 3 Email: anpu@cs.tut.fi c?2002 Published by Elsevier Science B. V. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 66 No. 2 (2002) Context-Sensitive Visibility Antti Valmari 1, Heikki Virtanen 2 and Antti Puhakka 3 Institute of Software Systems Tampere University of Technology Tampere, Finland Abstract An improvement to the so-called visual verification approach is presented. Visual verification is a method for checking the correctness of the behaviour of a reactive or concurrent system. It shares a great deal of common ground with ordinary formal state space verification, but is more user-friendly. This is because the user does not need to specify in detail the properties that the system must satisfy to be correct. Instead, the user only lists the atomic actions that are relevant for the property. Computer tools are used to obtain a graphical representation which is a summary of all possible alternative behaviours of the system, and the user then analyses the result. The improvement presented in this article allows the user to pick a region of the graphical representation and investigate it in more detail, without being overwhelmed by the details outside the region. The improvement is illustrated by analysing the livelocks in a model of the alternating bit protocol. 1 Introduction In order to improve the quality of concurrent and reactive systems, in partic- ular