System Validation via Constraint Modeling

Abstract

Constraint modeling could be a very important system validation method, because its abilities are complementary to both testing and code inspection. In particular, even though the ability of constraint modeling to find errors is limited by the simplifications which are introduced when making a constraint model, constraint modeling can locate important classes of errors which are caused by non-local faults (i.e., are hard to find with code inspection) and manifest themselves as failures only in unusual situations (i.e., are hard to find with testing).