Counting Interface Automata and their Application in Static Analysis of Actor Models

E. Wandeler, J.W. Janneck, E.A. Lee, L. Thiele

in Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods - SEFM 2005, Koblenz, Germany, September 5-9, 2005

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ABSTRACT

We present an interface theory based approach to static analysis of actor models. We first introduce a new interface theory, which is based on Interface Automata, and which is capable of counting with numbers. Using this new interface theory, we can capture temporal and quantitative aspects of an actor interface as well as an actor's token exchange rate. We will show how to extract this information from actors written in the Cal Actor Language (Cal), and we also present a method to capture the interface information as well as the structure of dataflow models into an interface automaton. This automaton acts as glue between the automata of all actors in the model, and by successfully composing all actor automata with it, we can prove interface compatibility of all actors with the composition framework. After successful composition, the resulting automaton will contain information that can be used for further static analysis of the composite actor model.