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).