Modeling concurrent systems with shared resources

Abstract

Testing is the more widely used approach to (partial) system validation in industry. The introduction of concurrency makes exhaustive testing extremely costly or just impossible, requiring shifting to formal verification techniques. We propose a methodology to design and verify a concurrent system that splits the verification problem in two independent tasks: internal verification of shared resources, where some concurrency aspects like mutual exclusion and conditional synchronisation are isolated, and external verification of processes, where synchronisation mechanisms are not relevant. Our method is language independent, non-intrusive for the development process, and improves the portability of the resulting system. We demonstrate it by actually checking several properties of an example application using the TLC model checker. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.