We got our work on combining Qualitative Reasoning Techniques with Action Systems accepted at ICFEM 2009 in Rio.
This year the conference was highly competitive with an acceptance rate below 30 percent. The paper integrates Qualitative Differential Equations into Back's Action System formalism for modeling hybrid systems. The work forms part of the MOGENTES Project and aims at model-based testing of hybrid systems.
To our knowledge this is the first time that Qualitative Differential Equations have been merged into a formal development technique. The results are not limited to Action Systems, but apply also to similar formalisms like e.g. Event-B.
Bernhard K. Aichernig, Harald Brandl, and Willibald Krenn. Qualitative action systems. In Proceedings of ICFEM 2009: 11th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, Dec 9-12, 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag, 2009. in press. (PDF)
Paper abstract: An extension to action systems is presented facilitating the modeling of continuous behavior in the discrete domain. The original action system formalism has been developed by Back et al. in order to describe parallel and distributed computations of discrete systems, i.e. systems with discrete state space and discrete control. In order to cope with hybrid systems, i.e. systems with continuous evolution and discrete control, two extensions have been proposed: hybrid action sys- tems and continuous action systems. Both use di erential equations (relations) to describe continuous evolution. Our version of action systems takes an alternative approach by adding a level of abstraction: continuous behavior is modeled by Qualitative Di erential Equations that are the preferred choice when it comes to specifying abstract and possibly non-deterministic requirements of continuous behavior. Because their solutions are transition systems, all evolutions in our qualitative action systems are discrete. Based on hybrid action systems, we develop a new theory of qualitative action systems and discuss how we have applied such models in the context of automated test-case generation for hybrid systems.
