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Publicações

Publicações por Alcino Cunha

2021

Experiences on teaching alloy with an automated assessment platform

Autores
Macedo, N; Cunha, A; Pereira, J; Carvalho, R; Silva, R; Paiva, ACR; Ramalho, MS; Silva, D;

Publicação
SCIENCE OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING

Abstract
This paper presents Alloy4Fun, a web application that enables online editing and sharing of Alloy models and instances (including dynamic ones developed with the Electrum extension), to be used mainly in an educational context. By introducing secret paragraphs and commands in the models, Alloy4Fun allows the distribution and automated assessment of simple specification challenges, a mechanism that enables students to learn the language at their own pace. Alloy4Fun stores all versions of shared and analyzed models, as well as derivation trees that depict how they evolved over time: this wealth of information can be mined by researchers or tutors to identify, for example, learning breakdowns in the class or typical mistakes made by Alloy users. A data analysis library is also provided to support this process. Alloy4Fun has been used in formal methods graduate courses for 3 years and for the latest editions we present results regarding its adoption by the students, as well as preliminary insights regarding the most common bottlenecks when learning Alloy (and Electrum).

2021

The High-Assurance ROS Framework

Autores
Santos, A; Cunha, A; Macedo, N;

Publicação
2021 IEEE/ACM 3RD INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON ROBOTICS SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (ROSE 2021)

Abstract
This tool paper presents the High-Assurance ROS (HAROS) framework. HAROS is a framework for the analysis and quality improvement of robotics software developed using the popular Robot Operating System (ROS). It builds on a static analysis foundation to automatically extract models from the source code. Such models are later used to enable other sorts of analyses, such as Model Checking, Runtime Verification, and Property-based Testing. It has been applied to multiple real-world examples, helping developers find and correct various issues.

2022

Schema-guided Testing of Message-oriented Systems

Autores
Santos, A; Cunha, A; Macedo, N;

Publicação
ENASE: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 17TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON EVALUATION OF NOVEL APPROACHES TO SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Abstract
Effective testing of message-oriented software requires describing the expected behaviour of the system and the causality relations between messages. This is often achieved with formal specifications based on temporal logics that require both first-order and metric temporal constructs - to specify constraints over data and real time. This paper proposes a technique to automatically generate tests for metric first-order temporal specifications that match well-understood specification patterns. Our approach takes in properties in a high-level specification language and identifies test schemas (strategies) that are likely to falsify the property. Schemas correspond to abstract classes of execution traces, that can be refined by introducing assumptions about the system. At the low level, concrete traces are successively produced for each schema using property-based testing principles. We instantiate this approach for a popular robotic middleware, ROS, and evaluate it on two systems, showing that schema-based test generation is effective for message-oriented software.

2022

Timely Specification Repair for Alloy 6

Autores
Cerqueira, J; Cunha, A; Macedo, N;

Publicação
SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND FORMAL METHODS, SEFM 2022

Abstract
This paper proposes the first mutation-based technique for the repair of Alloy 6 first-order temporal logic specifications. This technique was developed with the educational context in mind, in particular, to repair submissions for specification challenges, as allowed, for example, in the Alloy4Fun web-platform. Given an oracle and an incorrect submission, the proposed technique searches for syntactic mutations that lead to a correct specification, using previous counterexamples to quickly prune the search space, thus enabling timely feedback to students. Evaluation shows that, not only is the technique feasible for repairing temporal logic specifications, but also outperforms existing techniques for non-temporal Alloy specifications in the context of educational challenges.

2022

Quantitative relational modelling with QAlloy

Autores
Silva, P; Oliveira, JN; Macedo, N; Cunha, A;

Publicação
Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2022, Singapore, Singapore, November 14-18, 2022

Abstract
Alloy is a popular language and tool for formal software design. A key factor to this popularity is its relational logic, an elegant specification language with a minimal syntax and semantics. However, many software problems nowadays involve both structural and quantitative requirements, and Alloy's relational logic is not well suited to reason about the latter. This paper introduces QAlloy, an extension of Alloy with quantitative relations that add integer quantities to associations between domain elements. Having integers internalised in relations, instead of being explicit domain elements like in standard Alloy, allows quantitative requirements to be specified in QAlloy with a similar elegance to structural requirements, with the side-effect of providing basic dimensional analysis support via the type system. The QAlloy Analyzer also implements an SMT-based engine that enables quantities to be unbounded, thus avoiding many problems that may arise with the current bounded integer semantics of Alloy.

2022

Verification of railway network models with EVEREST

Autores
Martins, J; Fonseca, JM; Costa, R; Campos, JC; Cunha, A; Macedo, N; Oliveira, JN;

Publicação
Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, MODELS 2022, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, October 23-28, 2022

Abstract
Models-at different levels of abstraction and pertaining to different engineering views-are central in the design of railway networks, in particular signalling systems. The design of such systems must follow numerous strict rules, which may vary from project to project and require information from different views. This renders manual verification of railway networks costly and error-prone. This paper presents EVEREST, a tool for automating the verification of railway network models that preserves the loosely coupled nature of the design process. To achieve this goal, EVEREST first combines two different views of a railway network model-the topology provided in signalling diagrams containing the functional infrastructure, and the precise coordinates of the elements provided in technical drawings (CAD)-in a unified model stored in the railML standard format. This railML model is then verified against a set of user-defined infrastructure rules, written in a custom modal logic that simplifies the specification of spatial constraints in the network. The violated rules can be visualized both in the signalling diagrams and technical drawings, where the element(s) responsible for the violation are highlighted. EVEREST is integrated in a long-term effort of EFACEC to implement industry-strong tools to automate and formally verify the design of railway solutions. © 2022 ACM.

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