Formal verification of IoT applications using rewriting logic: An MDE-based approach

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are complex assemblies of components that collaborate to achieve common goals. These components are based on heterogeneous technologies, and they communicate using various communication protocols. This heterogeneity makes the design and the development of IoT applications a challenging issue. Diverse approaches based on Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) have been proposed to overcome this major issue using suitable modeling languages. ThingML is a promising UML profile for modeling IoT applications that aims to address the challenges of heterogeneity. However, ThingML does not have rigorous semantics, making it unsuitable for formal verification and analysis of system designs. This paper proposes an MDE-based formal approach to define the formal semantics of the ThingML language using rewriting logic and its language Maude. The main advantage of our approach over other approaches lies in the universality and versatility of Maude's mathematical notation, which implements all ThingML concepts and their behavioral aspects in a unified formal logic. The existing Maude language verification tools provide powerful analysis techniques, including simulation and model checking, which enable rigorous analysis and verification of ThingML designs. The contributions of this work include the following: (i) we propose a semantics mapping between ThingML concepts and Maude constructs, (ii) we define and implement an operational semantics for the ThingML action language in the Maude language, and (iii) we develop a tool that enables the automatic transformation of ThingML specifications into Maude. Our approach is illustrated through a case study.