Observer Patterns for Timed Properties

Abstract

Dwyer et al. proposed qualitative specification patterns that enable the practitioners of model checking tools to write formal specifications mainly used for automatic model checking. Although this involves formalisms that are not always easy to handle by engineers, to facilitate the integration of formal methods based on these definition patterns in the industrial field, several formal techniques and languages have been proposed. This paper studies a domain specific language named CDL which help non-experts writing formal specifications effortlessly. In CDL, a property is transformed into an observer automaton to perform a reachability analysis. The existing CDL patterns allow non-experts to reason about occurrence and order of events, but not enough about their timing. Furthermore, the semantics of patterns and transformations are not ideally formalized and are still complex. This work serves to extend the existing CDL system by patterns related to time. The contribution is illustrated in an industrial embedded system.