Who is pointing when to whom: on model-checking pointer structures

… IV: IFIP TC6/WG6. 1 Fourth …, 2000

This paper presents a logic, called BOTL (Object-Based Temporal Logic), that facilitates the specification of dynamic and static properties of object-based systems. The logic is based on the branching temporal logic CTL and the Object Constraint Language (OCL), an optional part of the UML standard for expressing static properties over class diagrams. The formal semantics of BOTL is defined in terms of a general operational model that is aimed to be applicable to a wide range of object-oriented languages. A mapping of a large fragment of OCL onto BOTL is defined, thus providing a formal semantics to OCL.

Allocational Temporal Logic (ATL) is a formalism to express properties concerning the dynamic allocation and de-allocation of entities, such as the objects in an object-based system. The logic is interpreted on History-Dependent Automata, extended with a symbolic representation for certain cases of unbounded allocation. A simple imperative language with primitive statements for (de)allocation, demonstrate the kind of behaviour that can be modelled. A model checking algorithm for ATL is shortly sketched.

2001

Abstract This paper proposes Allocational Temporal Logic (ATL) as a formalism to express properties concerning the dynamic allocation (birth) and de-allocation (death) of entities, such as the objects in an object-based system. The logic is interpreted on History-Dependent Automata, extended with a symbolic representation for certain cases of unbounded allocation.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1994

FSTTCS 2004: Foundations of …, 2005

This paper introduces an extension of linear temporal logic that allows to express properties about systems that are composed of entities (like objects) that can refer to each other via pointers. Our logic is focused on specifying properties about the dynamic evolution (such as creation, adaptation, and removal) of such pointer structures. The semantics is based on automata on infinite words, extended with appropriate means to model evolving pointer structures in an abstract manner. A tableau-based model-checking algorithm is proposed to automatically verify these automata against formulae in our logic.

Handbook of Modal Logic, 2007

Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 1996

We introduce and study hierarchies of extensions of the propositional modal and temporal languages with pairs of new syntactic devices: "point of reference -reference pointer" which enable semantic references to be made within a formula. We propose three different but equivalent semantics for the extended languages, discuss and compare their expressiveness. The languages with reference pointers are shown to have great expressive power (especially when their frugal syntax is taken into account), perspicuous semantics, and simple deductive systems. For instance, Kamp's and Stavi's temporal operators, as well as nominals (names, clock variables), are definable in them. Universal validity in these languages is proved undecidable. The basic modal and temporal logics with reference pointers are uniformly axiomatized and a strong completeness theorem is proved for them and extended to some classes of their extensions.

Logics for concurrency, 1996

The automata-theoretic approach to linear temporal logic uses the theory of automata as a unifying paradigm for program specification, verification, and synthesis. Both programs and specifications are in essence descriptions of computations. These computations can be viewed as words over some alphabet. Thus, programs and specifications can be viewed as descriptions of languages over some alphabet. The automata-theoretic perspective considers the relationships between programs and their specifications as relationships between languages. By translating programs and specifications to automata, questions about programs and their specifications can be reduced to questions about automata. More specifically, questions such as satisfiability of specifications and correctness of programs with respect to their specifications can be reduced to questions such as nonemptiness and containment of automata. Unlike classical automata theory, which focused on automata on finite words, the applications to program specification, verification, and synthesis, use automata on infinite words, since the computations in which we are interested are typically infinite. This paper provides an introduction to the theory of automata on infinite words and demonstrates its applications to program specification, verification, and synthesis.

Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science

In the last decades much research effort has been devoted to extending the success of model checking from the traditional field of finite state machines and various versions of temporal logics to suitable subclasses of context-free languages and appropriate extensions of temporal logics. To the best of our knowledge such attempts only covered structured languages, i.e. languages whose structure is immediately "visible" in their sentences, such as tree-languages or visibly pushdown ones. In this paper we present a new temporal logic suitable to express and automatically verify properties of operator precedence languages. This "historical" language family has been recently proved to enjoy fundamental algebraic and logic properties that make it suitable for model checking applications yet breaking the barrier of visible-structure languages (in fact the original motivation of its inventor Floyd was just to support efficient parsing, i.e. building the "hidden syntax tree" of language sentences). We prove that our logic is at least as expressive as analogous logics defined for visible pushdown languages yet covering a much more powerful family; we design a procedure that, given a formula in our logic builds an automaton recognizing the sentences satisfying the formula, whose size is at most exponential in the length of the formula.

Journal of Logic and …, 2007