Model Construction and Priority Synthesis for Simple Interaction Systems

Chih-Hong Cheng, Saddek Bensalem, Barbara Jobstmann, Rongjie Yan, Alois Knoll and Harald Ruess.
Proceedngs of NASA Formal Methods – Third International Symposium, NFM 2011, Pasadena, CA, USA.
VissBIP is a software tool for visualizing and automatically orchestrating component-based systems consisting of a set of components and their possible interactions. The graphical interface of VissBIP allows the user to interactively construct BIP models, from which executable code (C/C++) is generated. The main contribution of VissBIP is an analysis and synthesis engine for orchestrating components. Given a set of BIP components together with their possible interactions and a safety property, the VissBIP synthesis engine restricts the set of possible interactions in order to rule out unsafe states. The synthesis engine of VissBIP is based on automata-based (game-theoretic) notions. It checks if the system satisfies a given safety property. If the check fails, the tool automatically generates additional constraints on the interactions that ensure the desired property. The generated constraints define priorities between interactions and are therefore well-suited for conflict resolution between components.