Modelling and Simulation of Asynchronous Real-Time Systems using Timed Rebeca

TL;DR

This paper introduces an extension of the Rebeca language for modeling asynchronous distributed systems with timing constraints, providing formal semantics, a translation tool to Erlang, and demonstrating simulation as an effective analysis method.

Contribution

It presents a new timed extension of Rebeca, formal semantics, and a translation tool to Erlang, enabling simulation-based analysis of real-time asynchronous systems.

Findings

Timed Rebeca effectively models distributed systems with timing constraints.

The translation tool enables simulation in Erlang for various scenarios.

Simulation helps analyze systems where model checking faces state explosion.

Abstract

In this paper we propose an extension of the Rebeca language that can be used to model distributed and asynchronous systems with timing constraints. We provide the formal semantics of the language using Structural Operational Semantics, and show its expressiveness by means of examples. We developed a tool for automated translation from timed Rebeca to the Erlang language, which provides a first implementation of timed Rebeca. We can use the tool to set the parameters of timed Rebeca models, which represent the environment and component variables, and use McErlang to run multiple simulations for different settings. Timed Rebeca restricts the modeller to a pure asynchronous actor-based paradigm, where the structure of the model represents the service oriented architecture, while the computational model matches the network infrastructure. Simulation is shown to be an effective analysis support, specially where model checking faces almost immediate state explosion in an asynchronous setting.