Business artifacts allow to manage operations of business processes by capturing the key concepts and relevant information to guide their work flow. The Guard-Stage- Milestone (GSM) meta-model is a novel formalism for designing business artifacts that features declarative description of the intended behaviour without requiring an explicit specification of the control flow. Its concept of hierarchical structures of stages and explicit rules for the fulfilment of their guards and milestones supports the designing process but poses a challenge for formal verification. We show here how to approach the verification problem by developing a symbolic representation amenable to model checking. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by presenting a case study on the direct verification of a GSM model using a tool implementation.

Concurrent systems are prone to deadlocks that arise from competing access to shared resources and synchronization between the components. At the same time, concurrency leads to a dramatic increase of the possible state space due to interleavings of computations, which makes standard verification techniques often infeasible. Previous work has shown that approximating the state space of component based systems by computing invariants allows to verify much larger systems then standard methods that compute the exact state space. The approach comes with the drawback, though, that not all of the reported specification violations may be reachable in the system. This paper deals with that problem by combining the information from the invariant with model checking techniques and strategies for reducing the memory footprint. The approach is implemented as post processing step for generating the exact set of reachable specification violations along with traces to demonstrate the error.

Abstract If a program does not fulfill its specification, a model checker can deliver a counterexample. However, although such a counterexample shows how the specification can be violated, it typically comprises large parts of the program and gives little information about which of the visited statements is responsible for the error. In this article, we show that model checkers can also be used to perform model‐based diagnosis and thus fault localization. The approach leads to significantly more precise diagnoses than the state‐of‐the‐art and typically rules out 90–99% of the code as possible fault locations. The approach is general and can be applied to any system that is amenable to model checking (with respect to language and complexity). To demonstrate the applicability and high precision of our approach, we present implementations for C programs using two different model checking tools and show experimental results from the TCAS case study and an integration with the DDVerify framework to debug Linux device drivers. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract This article describes a framework to formally model and analyse human behaviour. This is shown by a simple case study of a chocolate vending machine, which represents many aspects of human behaviour. The case study is modelled and analysed using the Maude rewrite system. This work extends a previous work by Basuki which attempts to model interactions between human and machine and analyse the possibility of errors occurring in the interactions. By redesigning the interface, it can be shown that certain kinds of error can be avoided for some users. This article overcomes the limitation of Basuki’s approach by incorporating many aspects of user behaviour into a single user model, and introduces a more natural approach to model human–computer interaction.