Yliès Falcone

The paper Quantified Event Automata: Towards Expressive and Efficient Runtime Monitors has been accepted for publication at FM’2012 (the 18th international symposium on Formal Methods). Below is the abstract:

Runtime verification is the process of checking a property on a trace of events produced by the execution of a computational system. Runtime verification techniques have recently focused on parametric specifications where events take data values as parameters. These techniques exist on a spectrum inhabited by both efficient and expressive techniques. These characteristics are usually shown to be conflicting – in state-of-the-art solutions, efficiency is obtained at the cost of loss of expressiveness and vice-versa. To seek a solution to this conflict we explore a new point on the spectrum by defining an alternative runtime verification approach. We introduce a new formalism for concisely capturing expressive specifications with parameters. Our technique is more expressive than the currently most efficient techniques while at the same time allowing for optimizations.

This is joint work with Howard Barringer (U of Manchester), Klaus Havelund (NASA JPL), Giles Reger (U of Manchester), and David Rydeheard (U of Manchester).

The journal paper More Testable Properties has been recently accepted for publication in the journal Software Tools for Technology Transfer.

This paper is joint work with my friends and colleagues from Verimag (Jean-Claude Fernandez and Laurent Mounier) and from Inria Rennes – Bretagne Atlantique (Thierry Jéron and Hervé Marchand).

The paper shall appear in STTT shortly. One can download a preprint of the paper meanwhile.

Below is an abstract of the paper:

In this article, we explore the set of testable properties within the Safety-Progress classification where testability means to establish by testing that a relation, between the tested system and the property under scrutiny, holds. We characterize testable properties w.r.t. several relations of interest. For each relation, we give a sufficient condition for a property to be testable. Then, we study and delineate a fine-grain characterization of testable properties: for each Safety-Progress class, we identify the subset of testable properties and their corresponding test oracle. Furthermore, we address automatic test generation for the proposed framework by providing a general synthesis technique that allows to obtain canonical testers for the testable properties in the Safety-Progress classification. Moreover, we show how the usual notion of quiescence can be taken into account in our general framework, and, how quiescence improves the testability results. Then, we list some existing testing approaches that could benefit from this work by addressing a wider set of properties. Finally, we propose Java-PT, a prototype Java toolbox that implements the results introduced in this article.