EPTL - A temporal logic for weakly consistent systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces EPTL, a novel temporal logic designed specifically for specifying properties of weakly consistent systems, addressing the lack of standard specification methods for such systems.

Contribution

The paper presents EPTL, a new temporal logic tailored for weakly consistent systems, and demonstrates its embedding in Isabelle/HOL for formal verification.

Findings

EPTL effectively captures non-serializable operations in weakly consistent systems.

Embedding in Isabelle/HOL enables semi-automatic proof capabilities.

Provides a formal framework for specifying and verifying weakly consistent system behaviors.

Abstract

The high availability and scalability of weakly-consistent systems attracts system designers. Yet, writing correct application code for this type of systems is difficult; even how to specify the intended behavior of such systems is still an open question. There has not been established any standard method to specify the intended dynamic behavior of a weakly consistent system. There exist specifications of various consistency models for distributed and concurrent systems; and the semantics of replicated datatypes like CRDTs have been specified in axiomatic and operational models based on visibility relations. In this paper, we present a temporal logic, EPTL, that is tailored to specify properties of weakly consistent systems. In contrast to LTL and CTL, EPTL takes into account that operations of weakly consistent systems are in many cases not serializable and have to be treated respectively to capture the behavior. We embed our temporal logic in Isabelle/HOL and can thereby leverage strong semi-automatic proving capabilities.