Compositional verification using CADP of the scalagent deployment protocol for software components

Abstract

In this article, we report about the application of the CADP verification toolbox to check the correctness of an industrial protocol for deploying and configuring transparently a large set of heterogeneous software components over a set of distributed computers/devices. To cope with the intrinsic complexity of this protocol, compositional verification techniques have been used, including incremental minimization and projections over automatically generated interfaces as advocated by Graf & Steffen and Krimm & Mounier. Starting from the XML description of a configuration of components to be deployed by the protocol, a translator produces a set of LOTOS descriptions, μ-calculus formulas, and the corresponding compositional verification scenario to be executed. The approach is fully automated, as formal methods and tool invocations are made invisible to the end-user, who only has to check the verification results for the configuration under study. Due to the use of compositional verification, the approach can scale to large configurations. So far, LOTOS descriptions of more than seventy concurrent processes have been verified successfully. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2003.