DICER 2.0: A New Model Checker for Data-Flow Errors of Concurrent Software Systems

• Main Authors: Dongming Xiang, Fang Zhao, Yaping Liu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-04-01
• Series: Mathematics
• Subjects: petri net; concurrent software systems; model-checking; data-flows
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/9/9/966

Petri nets are widely used to model concurrent software systems. Currently, there are many different kinds of Petri net tools that can analyze system properties such as deadlocks, reachability and liveness. However, most tools are not suitable to analyze data-flow errors of concurrent systems because they do not formalize data information and lack efficient computing methods for analyzing data-flows. Especially when a concurrent system has so many concurrent data operations, these Petri net tools easily suffer from the state–space explosion problem and pseudo-states. To alleviate these problems, we develop a new model checker DICER 2.0. By using this tool, we can model the control-flows and data-flows of concurrent software systems. Moreover, the errors of data inconsistency can be detected based on the unfolding techniques, and some model-checking can be done via the guard-driven reachability graph (GRG). Furthermore, some case studies and experiments are done to show the effectiveness and advantage of our tool.