Specification and automated verification of atomic concurrent real-time transactions

Abstract

Many database management systems (DBMS) need to ensure atomicity and isolation of transactions for logical data consistency, as well as to guarantee temporal correctness of the executed transactions. Since the mechanisms for atomicity and isolation may lead to breaching temporal correctness, trade-offs between these properties are often required during the DBMS design. To be able to address this concern, we have previously proposed the pattern-based UPPCART framework, which models the transactions and the DBMS mechanisms as timed automata, and verifies the trade-offs with provable guarantee. However, the manual construction of UPPCART models can require considerable effort and is prone to errors. In this paper, we advance the formal analysis of atomic concurrent real-time transactions with tool-automated construction of UPPCART models. The latter are generated automatically from our previously proposed UTRAN specifications, which are high-level UML-based specifications familiar to designers. To achieve this, we first propose formal definitions for the modeling patterns in UPPCART, as well as for the pattern-based construction of DBMS models, respectively. Based on this, we establish a translational semantics from UTRAN specifications to UPPCART models, to provide the former with a formal semantics relying on timed automata, and develop a tool that implements the automated transformation. We also extend the expressiveness of UTRAN and UPPCART, to incorporate transaction sequences and their timing properties. We demonstrate the specification in UTRAN, automated transformation to UPPCART, and verification of the traded-off properties, via an industrial use case.