Distributed Monitoring of Temporal System Properties Using Petri Nets

Abstract

Supervising a system in operation allows to detect a violation of system specification or temporal properties, and is the first step required by any reconfiguration mechanism. In this work, we focus on run-time verification of temporal system properties in distributed and real-time systems. Based on a description of a property that includes events and temporal constraints, expressed as an arc timed Petri net, we automatically derive a monitoring system responsible for checking this property. The proposed approach enables the distributed verification of system properties. Our contribution is twofold. On the theoretical side, we introduce a slight modification of the semantics of Petri nets to be able to execute it in partial executions and noisy observation environments. On the practical side, we show how to use this formal framework to provide a distributed and efficient monitoring system, and describe its current implementation.