Domain-specific scenarios for refinement-based methods

Abstract

Abstract Formal methods use abstraction and rigorously verified refinement to manage the design of complex systems, ensuring that they satisfy important invariant properties. However, formal verification is not sufficient: models must also be tested to ensure that they behave according to the informal requirements and validated by domain experts who may not be expert in formal modelling. This can be satisfied by scenarios that complement the requirements specification. The model can be animated to check whether the scenario is feasible in the model and that the model reaches the states expected in the scenario. However, there are two problems with this approach. 1) The natural language used to describe the scenarios is often verbose, ambiguous and therefore difficult to understand; especially if the modeller is not a domain expert. 2) Provided scenarios are typically at the most concrete level corresponding to the full requirements and cannot be used until all the refinements have been completed in the model. We show by example how a precise and concise domain specific language can be used for writing these abstract scenarios in a style that can be easily understood by the domain expert (for validation purposes) as well as the modeller (for behavioural verification) and can be used as the persistence for automated tool support. We propose two alternative approaches to using scenarios during formal modelling: A method of refining scenarios before the model is refined so that the scenarios guide the modelling, and a method of abstracting scenarios from provided concrete ones so that they can be used to test early refinements of the model. We illustrate the two approaches on the ‘Tokeneer’ secure enclave example and the ERTMS/ETCS Hybrid Level 3 specification for railway controls. We base our approach on the Cucumber framework for scenarios and the Event-B modelling language and tool set. We have developed a new ‘Scenario Checker’ plugin to manage the animation of scenarios. 1