Revisiting Semantics of Interactions for Trace Validity Analysis
This work addresses a specific problem in formal methods for software verification, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing interaction language semantics.
The paper tackles the problem of analyzing trace validity in interaction languages like MSC by proposing an operational approach instead of translational methods, resulting in algorithms for semantic computation and trace validity that were experimentally analyzed.
Interaction languages such as MSC are often associated with formal semantics by means of translations into distinct behavioral formalisms such as automatas or Petri nets. In contrast to translational approaches we propose an operational approach. Its principle is to identify which elementary communication actions can be immediately executed, and then to compute, for every such action, a new interaction representing the possible continuations to its execution. We also define an algorithm for checking the validity of execution traces (i.e. whether or not they belong to an interaction's semantics). Algorithms for semantic computation and trace validity are analyzed by means of experiments.