Compositional Approach for Modeling and Verification of Component-Based Software Systems

With the rapid growth of networking and high-computing power, the demand of larger and more complex software systems has increased dramatically. To deal with the complexity in designing large-scale complex software systems, the concept of component-based software design has gained popularity recently. However, in pursuing a component-based approach there are obstacles to be overcome. One of them is the state-explosion problem in the formal verification of large-scale component-based systems. In this paper, we introduce a modeling technique and two condensation theories to model and verify component-based software systems. Our condensation theories are much weaker than current theories useful for the compositional verification. More significantly, our new condensation theories can eliminate the interleaved behaviors caused by asynchronously sending actions. Therefore, our technique provides a much more powerful means for the compositional verification of asynchronous processes. Our technique can efficiently analyze several state-based properties: deadlock state and reachable state. The experimental results show a significant improvement in the analysis of large-scale component-based systems.