Abstract

Formal verification of a hierarchical component application involves (i) checking of behavior compliance among sub-components of each composite component, and (ii) checking of implementation of each primitive component against its behavior specification and other properties like absence of concurrency errors. In this thesis, we focus on verification of primitive components implemented in Java against the properties of obeying a behavior specification defined in behavior protocols (frame protocol) and absence of concurrency errors. We use the Java PathFinder model checker as a core verification tool. We propose a set of techniques that address the key issues of formal verification of real-life components in Java via model checking: support for high-level property of obeying a behavior specification, environment modeling and construction, and state explosion. The techniques include (1) an extension to Java PathFinder that allows checking of Java code against a frame protocol, (2) automated generation of component environment from a model in the form of a behavior protocol, (3) efficient construction of the model of environment’s behavior, and (4) addressing state explosion in discovery of concurrency errors via reduction of the level of parallelism in a component environment on the basis of static analysis of Java bytecode and various heuristics. We have implemented all the techniques in the COMBAT toolset and evaluated them on two realistic component applications. Results of the experiments show that the techniques are viable.

Citations