Concurrency-Preserving and Sound Monitoring of Multi-Threaded Component-Based Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for monitoring global properties in multi-threaded component systems without disrupting concurrency, using on-the-fly global state reconstruction and a specialized tool for BIP systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to monitor global properties in concurrent systems by transforming components to preserve semantics and concurrency, enabling efficient runtime monitoring.

Findings

The method effectively reconstructs global states during execution.

The approach maintains system concurrency without significant overhead.

The RVMT-BIP tool successfully implements the monitoring technique.

Abstract

This paper addresses the monitoring of logic-independent linear-time user-provided properties in multi-threaded component-based systems. We consider intrinsically independent components that can be executed concurrently with a centralized coordination for multiparty interactions. In this context, the problem that arises is that a global state of the system is not available to the monitor. A naive solution to this problem would be to plug in a monitor which would force the system to synchronize in order to obtain the sequence of global states at runtime. Such a solution would defeat the whole purpose of having concurrent components. Instead, we reconstruct on-the-fly the global states by accumulating the partial states traversed by the system at runtime. We define transformations of components that preserve their semantics and concurrency and, at the same time, allow to monitor global-state properties. Moreover, we present RVMT-BIP, a prototype tool implementing the transformations for monitoring multi-threaded systems described in the BIP (Behavior, Interaction, Priority) framework, an expressive framework for the formal construction of heterogeneous systems. Our experiments on several multi-threaded BIP systems show that RVMT-BIP induces a cheap runtime overhead.