Validating RT-LOTOS Specifications using the TINA tool

The increasing development of highly concurrent and distributed systems captures scalability problems in terms of formal validation of models. In particular, reachability analysis tools commonly face a state explosion problem. Examples include the RTL tool developed by LAAS-CNRS for the formal description technique RT-LOTOS. By contrast, the TINA tool also developed by LAAS-CNRS for reachability analysis of Time Petri Net model turns to be more efficient in terms of graph size and traversal. How to reuse TINA for RT-LOTOS specification validation is the subject discussed in this paper. A formal background is defined for the RT-LOTOS to TPN translation process. The paper introduces the concept of composed TPNs and presents RT-LOTOS-to-TPN translation patterns. Given a TPN derived from a RT-LOTOS specification, we use bi-simulations to check the TPN’s reachability graph output by TINA against the reachability graph generated by RTL. The railroad-crossing example serves as case study for the paper. The short term objective is to apply the proposed approach to RT-LOTOS specifications derived from models expressed in the realtime UML profile TURTLE (Timed UML and RT-LOTOS Environment).