Automated verification of interactive rule-based configuration systems (original) (raw)
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Modern technical systems typically consist of multiple components and must provide many functions that are realized by the complex interaction of these components. Moreover, very often not only a single product, but a whole product line with different compositions of components and functions must be developed. To cope with this complexity, it is important that engineers have intuitive, but precise means for specifying the requirements for these systems and have tools for automatically finding inconsistencies within the requirements, because these could lead to costly iterations in the later development. We propose a technique for the scenario-based specification of component interactions based on Modal Sequence Diagrams. Moreover, we developed an efficient technique for automatically finding inconsistencies in the scenario-based specification of many variants at once by exploiting recent advances in the model-checking of product lines. Our evaluation shows benefits of this technique over performing individual consistency checking of each variant specification.
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AT&T labs-Research ODERN TELECOMMUNICAtions equipment is highly modular and can scale to a wide range of applications. Usually, the equipment's cost and complexity requires that it be manufactured-to-order, or at least assembled-to-order. In this context, orders double as specifications, describing what should be manufactured as well as how the product should be installed. Producing a correct and complete order for such equipment can be challenging when requirements are incomplete, inconsistent, or when the final product is large and complicated. A good order is technically correct and meets customer requirements for network capacity and growth without over-engineering. Incomplete configurations can lead to cost overruns if the missing elements are discovered during manufacturing. If they are not, faulty products can result. Either way, the customers are unhappy. We have tackled the configuration problem for a number of large telecommunications products sold by AT&T and Lucent Technologies. Our Prose configurators are based on CLASSIC,' a description logic-based knowledge representation system developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
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Modern software-intensive systems typically consist of multiple components that provide many functions by their interaction. Moreover, often not only a single product, but a whole product line with different compositions of components and functions must be developed. To cope with this complexity, engineers need intuitive, but precise means for specifying the requirements for these systems and require tools for automatically finding inconsistencies within the requirements, because inconsistencies could lead to costly iterations in the later development. In recent work, we proposed a technique for the scenario-based specification of interactions in product lines by a combination of Modal Sequence Diagrams and Feature Diagrams. Furthermore, we elaborated an efficient consistency-checking technique based on a dedicated model-checking approach for product lines. In this paper, we report on further evaluations that underline significant performance benefits of our approach. We describe further optimizations and detail on how we encode the consistency-checking problem for a model-checker. Many modern software-intensive systems consist of multiple components interacting together to deliver the intended functionality. Often, these systems come in many variants (products) and are managed together as a software product line. This variability is the source of * FNRS research fellow
Formulating constraint satisfaction problems for the inspection of configuration rules
Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, 2015
Product configurationis when an artifact from a product family is assembled from a set of predefined components that can only be combined in certain ways. These ways are defined by configuration rules. The product developers inspect the configuration rules when they develop new configuration rules or modify the configuration rules set. The inspection of configuration rules is thereby an important activity to avoid errors in the configuration rules set. Several formulations of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) are proposed that facilitate the inspection of configuration rules in propositional logic (IF-THEN, AND, NOT, OR, etc.). Many of the configuration rules are so calledproduction rules; that is, a configuration rule is an IF-THEN expression that fires when the IF condition is met. Several configuration rules build chains that fire during the product configuration. It is therefore important not only to inspect single configuration rules but also to analyze the effect of mult...
Logic Verification of Product-Line Variant Requirements
2012 African Conference for Sofware Engineering and Applied Computing, 2012
Formal verification of variant requirements has gained much interest in the software product line (SPL) community. Feature diagrams are widely used to model product line variants. However, there is a lack of precisely defined formal notation for representing and verifying such models. This paper presents an approach to modeling and verifying SPL variant feature diagrams using first-order logic. It provides a precise and rigorous formal interpretation of the feature diagrams. Logical expressions can be built by modeling variants and their dependencies by using propositional connectives. These expressions can then be validated by any suitable verification tool. A case study of a Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system variant feature model is presented to illustrate the verification process.