A framework for compositional design and analysis of systems

Complex system design today calls for compositional design and implementation. However each component is designed with certain assumptions about the environment it is meant to operate in, and delivering certain guarantees if those assumptions are satisfied; numerous inter-component interaction errors are introduced in the manual and error-prone integration process as there is little support in design environments for machine-readably representing these assumptions and guarantees and automatically checking consistency during integration. Based on Interface Automata we propose a framework for compositional design and analysis of systems: a set of domain-specific automata-theoretic type systems for compositional system specification and analysis by behavioral specification of open systems. We focus on three different domains: component-based hardware systems communicating on bidirectional wires. concurrent distributed recursive message-passing software systems, and embedded software system components operating in resource-constrained environments. For these domains we present approaches to formally represent the assumptions and conditional guarantees between interacting open system components. Composition of such components produces new components with the appropriate assumptions and guarantees. We check satisfaction of temporal logic specifications by such components, and the substitutability of one component with another in an arbitrary context. Using this framework one can analyze large systems incrementally without needing extensive summary information to close the system at each stage. Furthermore, we focus only on the inter-component interaction behavior without dealing with the full implementation details of each component. Many of the merits of automata-theoretic model-checking are combined with the compositionality afforded by type-system based techniques. We also present an integer-based extension of the conventional boolean verification framework motivated by our interface formalism for embedded software components. Our algorithms for checking the behavioral compatibility of component interfaces are available in our tool Chic, which can be used as a plug-in for the Java IDE JBuilder and the heterogenous modeling and design environment Ptolemy II. Finally, we address the complementary problem of partitioning a large system into meaningful coherent components by analyzing the interaction patterns between its basic elements. We demonstrate the usefulness of our partitioning approach by evaluating its efficacy in improving unit-test branch coverage for a large software system implemented in C.