Specification and Verification of a Dynamic Reconfiguration Protocol for Agent-Based Applications

Manuel Aguilar Cornejo, Hubert Garavel, Radu Mateescu, and Noel de Palma

Proceedings of the 3rd IFIP WG 6.1 International Working Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems DAIS'2001 (Krakow, Poland), September 2001

Available as INRIA Research Report RR-4222.

Abstract:

Dynamic reconfiguration increases the availability of distributed applications by allowing them to evolve at run-time. This paper deals with the formal specification and model-checking verification of a dynamic reconfiguration protocol used in industrial agent-based applications. Starting from a reference implementation in Java, we produced a specification of the protocol using the Formal Description Technique LOTOS. We also specified a set of temporal logic formulas characterizing the correct behaviour of each protocol primitive. Finally, we studied various finite state configurations of the protocol, on which we verified these requirements using the CADP protocol engineering tool set.

32 pages

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Slides of R. Mateescu's lecture at DAIS'01

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