From UML to process algebra and back : an automated approach to model-checking software design artifacts of concurrent systems

One of the challenges in concurrent software development is early discovery of design errors which could lead to deadlocks or race-conditions. For safety-critical and complex distributed applications, traditional testing does not always expose such problems. Performing more rigorous formal analysis typically requires a model, which is an abstraction of the system. For object-oriented software, UML is the industry-adopted modeling language. UML offers a number of views to present the system from different perspectives. Behavioral views are necessary for the purpose of model checking, as they capture the dynamics of the system. Among them are sequence diagrams, in which the interaction between components is modeled by means of message exchanges. UML 2.x includes rich features that enable modeling code-like structures, such as loops, conditions and referring to existing interactions. We present an automatic procedure for translating UML into mCRL2 process algebra models. Our prototype is able to produce a formal model, and feed model-checking traces back into any UML modeling tool, without the user having to leave the UML domain. We argue why previous approaches of which we are aware have limitations that we overcome. We further apply our methodology on the Grid framework used to support production activities of one of the LHC experiments at CERN