Verifying specifications with associated attributes in graph transformation systems

Abstract

Graph transformation is an important modeling and analysis technique widely applied in software engineering. The attributes can naturally conceptualize the properties of the modeled artifacts. However, the lack of support for the specification of such attribute correspondence by ordinary propositional temporal logics hampers its further application during verification. Different from the theoretical investigations on quantified second order logics, we propose a practical and light-weight approach for the verification of this kind of temporal specifications with associated attributes. Particularly, we apply our approach and extend the generalpurpose graph transformation modeling tool: Groove. Moreover, symmetry reduction techniques are exploited to reduce the number of states. Experiments with performance evaluations complement our discussion and demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of our approach.