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Abstract Alloy Instances

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Formal Methods (FM 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14000))

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Abstract

Alloy is a textual modeling language for structures and behaviors of software designs. One of the reasons for Alloy to become a popular light-weight formal method is its support for automated, bounded analyses, which is provided through the Analyzer toolset. The Analyzer provides the means to compute, visualize, and browse instances that either satisfy a model or violate an assertion. Understanding instances for the given analysis often requires much effort and there is no guarantee on the order or level of information of computed instances. To help address this, we introduce the concept of abstract Alloy instances, which abstract information common to all instances, while preserving information specific to the analysis. Our abstraction is based on introducing lower and upper bounds for elements that may appear in Alloy’s instances. We evaluate computation times and sizes of abstract instances on a set of benchmark Alloy models.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Alloy Analyzer requires analysis scopes as cardinalities for signatures. Our bounds are refinements of the bounds induced by those scopes, see Sect. 4.

  2. 2.

    We oversimplify the case of inheritance and relations for illustrative purposes, see our implementation in Sect. 5.1 for a more thorough handling.

  3. 3.

    Alloy distinguishes between primary and subset signatures where atoms of subset signatures always also belong to primary signatures.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bauhaus-University Weimar, Weimar, Germany

    Jan Oliver Ringert

  2. The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA

    Allison Sullivan

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  1. Jan Oliver Ringert
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Correspondence to Allison Sullivan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Marsha Chechik

  2. RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Joost-Pieter Katoen

  3. University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany

    Martin Leucker

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Ringert, J.O., Sullivan, A. (2023). Abstract Alloy Instances. In: Chechik, M., Katoen, JP., Leucker, M. (eds) Formal Methods. FM 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14000. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27481-7_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27481-7_21

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