Family-Based Modeling and Analysis for Probabilistic Systems – Featuring ProFeat

Abstract

Feature-based formalisms provide an elegant way to specify families of systems that share a base functionality and differ in certain features. They can also facilitate an all-in-one analysis, where all systems of the family are analyzed at once on a single family model instead of one-by-one. This paper presents the basic concepts of the tool $$\textsc {ProFeat}$$, which provides a guarded-command language for modeling families of probabilistic systems and an automatic translation of family models to the input language of the probabilistic model checker $$\textsc {Prism}$$. This translational approach enables a family-based quantitative analysis with Prism. Besides modeling families of systems that differ in system parameters such as the number of identical processes or channel sizes, $$\textsc {ProFeat}$$ also provides special support for the modeling and analysis of probabilistic product lines with dynamic feature switches, multi-features and feature attributes. By means of several case studies we show how $$\textsc {ProFeat}$$ eases family-based modeling and compare the one-by-one and all-in-one analysis approach.