Abstract
The Agreement Problem Protocol Verification Environment (APPROVE) for the automated formal verification of solutions to agreement problems is presented. Agreement problems are characterized by the need for a group of processes to agree on a proposed value and are exempli fied by group membership, consensus and leader election schemes. Generally it is accepted by practitioners in both academia and industry that the development of reliable and robust solutions to agreement problems is essential to the usability of group communication infrastructures. Thus, it is important that the correctness of new agreement algorithms be verified formally. In the past, the application of manual proof methods has been met with varying degrees of success, suggesting that a less error prone automated tool approach is required. Furthermore, an observation made during a review of such proofs is that a significant amount of effort is invested into repeatedly modeling re-usable themes. The APPROVE project addresses these issues by introducing a usable Spin based framework that exploits the potential for model re-use wherever possible1.
APPROVE v1.0 is available from: http://www.james-pascoe.com.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
D. A. Agarwal. Totem: A Reliable Ordered Delivery Protocol for Interconnected Local-Area Networks. PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1994.
H. Attiya and J. Welch. Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics. McGraw-Hill, 1998.
K. Berket. The InterGroup Protocols: Scalable Group Communication for the Internet. PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, December 2000.
K. P. Birman. The Process Group Approach to Reliable Distributed Computing. Communications of The ACM, pages 37–53, December 1993.
K. P. Birman. Building Secure and Reliable Network Applications. Prentice Hall, 1997. Available at: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/ken/.
T. D. Chandra and S. Toueg. Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, 43(2), 1996.
G. Coulouris, J. Dollimore, and T. Kindberg. Distributed Systems Concepts and Design. Addison-Wesley, third edition, 2001. See chapter 11 for Coordination and Agreement problems.
G. J. Holzmann. Design and Validation of Computer Protocols. Prentice Hall, 1991. An online version is available at: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/what/spin/Doc/Book91.html.
D. E. Knuth. Literate Programming. Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1992.
L. Lamport, R. Shostak, and M. Pease. Byzantine Generals Problem. ACM Transactions Programming Languages and Systems, 4(3):382–401, 1982.
R. J. Loader, J. S. Pascoe, and V. S. Sunderam. A Novel Approach To Group Membership In Collaborative Computing Environments. In Proc. of The 2001 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA’2001). CSREA Press, June 2001.
L. E. Moser, P. M. Melliar-Smith, D. A. Agarwal, R. K. Budhia, and C. A. Lingley-Papadopoulos. Totem: A Fault-Tolerant Multicast Group Communication System. In Communications of the ACM, April 1996.
J. S. Pascoe, R. J. Loader, and V. S. Sunderam. An Election Based Approach to Fault-Tolerant Group Membership in Collaborative Environments. In Proc. Of The 25th Anniversary Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC). IEEE Press, October 2001.
J. S. Pascoe, R. J. Loader, and V. S. Sunderam. APPROVE Technical Documentation. Technical report, Department of Computer Science, The University of Reading, November 2001. Available from: http://www.james-pascoe.com.
J. S. Pascoe, R. J. Loader, and V. S. Sunderam. Working Towards the Agreement Problem Protocol Verification Environment. In Alan Chalmers, Majid Mirmehdi and Henk Muller, editor, Communicating Process Architectures 2001, Concurrent Systems Engineering, pages 213–229, Bristol, September 2001. IOS Press.
J. S. Pascoe, R. J. Loader, and V. S. Sunderam. Collaborative Group Membership. The Journal of Supercomputing, 22(1):55–68, 2002. Accepted: 30th November 2001, In press.
N. Ramsey. Literate programming simplified. IEEE Software, 11:95–105, 1994.
O. Rodeh, K. P. Birman, and D. Dolev. The Architecture and Performance of Security Protocols in the Ensemble Group Communication System. Technical Report TR2000-1791, Cornell University, March 2000.
A. W. Roscoe. The Theory and Practice of Concurrency. Prentice Hall, 1997.
Theo C. Ruys. Low-Fat Recipes for SPIN. In Proc. of The 7th International SPIN Workshop, volume 1885 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, 2000.
Theo C. Ruys. Toward Effective Model Checking. PhD thesis, University of Twente, March 2001. ISBN: 90-365-1564-5.
Theo C. Ruys and Ed Brinksma. Experience with Literate Programming in the Modeling and Validation of Systems. In Bernhard Steffen, editor, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS’98), number 1384 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), pages 393–408, Lisbon, Portugal, April 1998. Springer-Verlag.
R. van Renesse, K. P. Birman, and S. Maffeis. Horus, A Flexible Group Communication System. In Communications of the ACM, April 1996.
Liu Xiaoming, Christoph Kreitz, Robbert van Renesse, Jason Hickey, Mark Hayden, Ken Birman, and Robert Constable. Building reliable, high-performance systems from components. In Proc. 17th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP’99)-Operating Systems Review, volume 34(5), pages 80–92, 1999.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pascoe, J.S., Loader, 1.J., Sunderam, V.S. (2002). The Agreement Problem Protocol Verification Environment. In: Bošnački, D., Leue, S. (eds) Model Checking Software. SPIN 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2318. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46017-9_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46017-9_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-43477-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46017-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive