Towards Practical Graph-Based Verification for an Object-Oriented Concurrency Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a practical graph transformation system-based approach for verifying object-oriented concurrent programs, specifically SCOOP, directly from code without extra annotations, enabling simulation and analysis of deadlocks and behaviors.

Contribution

It presents the first automatic translation of SCOOP programs into GTS for verification and demonstrates the use of GROOVE for semantics modeling and analysis of concurrency.

Findings

Successfully verified SCOOP programs for deadlocks and behaviors.

Implemented a run-time semantics model in GROOVE that captures key SCOOP features.

Showed the transferability of GTS-based semantics modeling to other concurrent languages.

Abstract

To harness the power of multi-core and distributed platforms, and to make the development of concurrent software more accessible to software engineers, different object-oriented concurrency models such as SCOOP have been proposed. Despite the practical importance of analysing SCOOP programs, there are currently no general verification approaches that operate directly on program code without additional annotations. One reason for this is the multitude of partially conflicting semantic formalisations for SCOOP (either in theory or by-implementation). Here, we propose a simple graph transformation system (GTS) based run-time semantics for SCOOP that grasps the most common features of all known semantics of the language. This run-time model is implemented in the state-of-the-art GTS tool GROOVE, which allows us to simulate, analyse, and verify a subset of SCOOP programs with respect to deadlocks and other behavioural properties. Besides proposing the first approach to verify SCOOP programs by automatic translation to GTS, we also highlight our experiences of applying GTS (and especially GROOVE) for specifying semantics in the form of a run-time model, which should be transferable to GTS models for other concurrent languages and libraries.