Adapting Integrity Checking Techniques for Concurrent Operation Executions

Abstract

One challenge for achieving executable models is preserving the integrity of the data. That is, given a structural model describing the constraints that the data should satisfy, and a behavioral model describing the operations that might change the data, the integrity checking problem consists in ensuring that, after executing the modeled operations, none of the specified constraints is violated. A multitude of techniques have been presented so far to solve the integrity checking problem. However, to the best of our knowledge, all of them assume that operations are not executed concurrently. As we are going to see, concurrent operation executions might lead to violations not detected by these techniques. In this paper, we present a technique for detecting and serializing those operations that can cause a constraint violation when executed concurrently, so that, previous incremental techniques, exploiting our approach, can be safely applied in systems with concurrent operation executions guaranteeing the integrity of the data.