ProFeat: feature-oriented engineering for family-based probabilistic model checking

Abstract

AbstractThe concept of features provides an elegant way to specify families of systems. Given a base system, features encapsulate additional functionalities that can be activated or deactivated to enhance or restrict the base system’s behaviors. Features can also facilitate the analysis of families of systems by exploiting commonalities of the family members and performing 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. Most prominent, the concept of features has been successfully applied to describe and analyze (software) product lines. We present the toolProFeatthat supports the feature-oriented engineering process for stochastic systems by probabilistic model checking. To describe families of stochastic systems,ProFeatextends models for the prominent probabilistic model checkerPrismby feature-oriented concepts, including support for probabilistic product lines with dynamic feature switches, multi-features and feature attributes.ProFeatprovides a compact symbolic representation of the analysis results for each family member obtained byPrismto support, e.g., model repair or refinement during feature-oriented development. By means of several case studies we show howProFeateases family-based quantitative analysis and compare one-by-one and all-in-one analysis approaches.