Formal specification languages are often perceived as difficult to use by practitioners, and are therefore rarely used in industrial software development practices. Numerous researchers have developed specification pattern systems to facilitate the construction of formal specifications of system properties. Feedback indicates that these patterns are considered helpful, but many practitioners prefer capturing properties using informal notations, such as natural language, instead of formal specification languages. This paper describes a project that addresses this technology gap. First, we introduce a stepwise process for deriving and instantiating system properties in terms of their natural language representations. The key components of this process are structured natural language grammars and specification pattern systems. Second, we describe SPIDER, a prototype implementation of a tool suite supporting this specification process. We illustrate the use of our approach with a description of a stepwise construction process of property specifications of a real-world automotive embedded system using SPIDER. 1.

Although data pow analysis was first developed for use in compilers, its usefulness is now recognized in many software tools. Because of its compiler origins, the computation of data pow for software tools is based on the traditional exhaustive data flow framework. However, although this framework is useful for computing data pow for compilers, it is not the most appropriate for sofsware tools, particularly those used in the maintenance stage. In maintenance, testing and debugging is typically performed in response to program changes. As such, the data pow required is demand driven from the changed program points. Rather than compute the data flow exhaustively using the traditional data flow framework, we present a framework for partial analysis. The framework includes a specification language enabling the specification of the demand driven data flow desired by a user. From the specification, a partial analysis algorithm is automatically generated using an L-attributed definition for the grammar of the specification language. A specification of a demand driven data pow problem expresses characteristics that define the kind of traversal needed in the partial analysis and the type of dependencies to be captured. The partial analyses algorithms are eficient in that only as much of the program is analyzed as actually needed, thus reducing the time and space requirements over exhaustively computing the data flow information. The algorithms are shown to be useful when debugging and testing programs during maintenance. Keywords- control pow graph (CFG), program debugging, program testing, code optimization. 1

Businesses around the world arepaying more attention to process management and process automation to improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness. In this paper, we describe a general framework for implementing dynamic routing and operational control mechanisms in Workflow Management Systems (WMSs). The framework consists of three techniques: workflow control tables, sequence constraints, and event-based workflow management rules. Our approach offers several unique features that are missing in commercial workflow management systems: (1) it provides more flexibility in process modeling and control; (2) it permits rework on an ad hocbasis; (3) it handles exceptions to routing and operational controls; and (4) it exploits parallelism to increase system throughput and response time. Finally, the workflow management techniques are applied to the case of consumer loan management and compared with other approaches based on static routing.

Formal methods like model checking can be used to demonstrate that safety properties of embedded systems are enforced by the system's requirements. Unfortunately, proving these properties provides no guarantee that they will be preserved in an implementation of the system. We have developed a tool, called Analyzer, which helps discover instances of inconsistency and incompleteness in implementations with respect to requirements. Analyzer uses requirements information to automatically generate properties which ensure that required state transitions appear in a model of an implementation. A model is created through abstract interpretation of an implementation annotated with assertions about values of state variables which appear in requirements. Analyzer determines if the model satisfies both automatically-generated and userspecified safety properties. This paper presents a description of our implementation of Analyzer and our experience in applying it to a small but realistic problem.

It is well known that errors introduced early in the development process are commonly the most expensive to correct. The increasingly popular model-driven architecture (MDA) exacerbates this problem by propagating these errors automatically to design and code. This paper describes a round trip engineering process that supports the specification of a UML model using CASE tools, the analysis of specified natural language properties, and the subsequent model refinement to eliminate errors uncovered during the analysis. This process has been implemented in SPIDER, a tool suite that enables developers to specify and analyze a UML model with respect to behavioral properties specified in terms of natural language. 1.

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Temporal workflow management is important for processes that are time-driven. Claim handling, which requires the documentation, diagnosis, and resolution of customer claims due to faulty products or unsatisfactory services, is an example of such a process because fast turnaround is critical for customer satisfaction. However, little research has been reported in this area, especially at the policy level. In this paper, we develop a framework for temporal workflow management, which includes issues such as turnaround time predication, time allocation, and task prioritization. We propose also the use of reward functions to guide workers' behavior with the goal of increasing efficiency while allowing flexibility. 1. INTRODUCTION A workflow system is a piece of software that helps coordinate and manage work processes (WFMC, 1994; Sheth, 1996). Workflow management refers to managerial activities either manual or automatic such as modeling the work processes, allocating tasks to roles that ...

Abstract. A pattern-based approach to the presentation, codification and reuse of property specifications for finite-state verification was proposed by Dwyer and his colleagues in [4,3]. The patterns enable nonexperts to read and write formal specifications for realistic systems and facilitate easy conversion of specifications between formalisms, such as LTL, CTL, QRE. In this paper we extend the pattern system with events — changes of values of variables in the context of LTL. 1

FLAVERS, a tool for verifying properties of concurrent systems, uses composite data flow analysis to incrementally improve the precision of the results of its verifications. Although FLAVERS is one of the few static analysis techniques for concurrent systems that has the potential to handle large scale systems, it sometimes can still be very expensive to use. In this paper we experimentally compare the cost of two versions of this approach for solving composite data flow analysis problems. The first version, productbased, uses the more straightforward approach, and the second, tuple-based, is built around the idea of reducing analysis space requirements at the expense of analysis time. We demonstrate experimentally, by analyzing properties of actual concurrent programs, that the tuple-based version is comparable in time to the product-based version but for large composite data flow problems it requires several orders of magnitude less space. Keywords Static analysis, data flow analys...

We present and investigate the problem of mining scenario-based triggers and effects from execution traces, in the framework of Damm and Harel’s live sequence charts (LSC); a visual, modal, scenario-based, inter-object language. Given a ‘trigger scenario’, we extract LSCs whose pre-chart is equivalent to the given trigger; dually, given an ‘effect scenario’, we extract LSCs whose main-chart is equivalent to the given effect. Our algorithms use data mining methods to provide significant sound and complete results modulo user-defined thresholds. Both the input trigger and effect scenarios, and the resulting candidate modal scenarios, are represented and visualized using a UML2compliant variant of LSC. Thus, existing modeling tools can be used both to specify the input for the miner and to exploit its output. Experiments performed with several applications show promising results. 1.