From Formal Methods to Executable Code

Abstract

The objective of this work is the derivation of software that is verifiably correct. Our approach is to abstract system specifications and model these in a formal framework called Timed Input/Output Automata, which provides a notation for expressing distributed systems and mathematical support for reasoning about their properties. Although formal reasoning is easier at an abstract level, it is not clear how to transform these abstractions into executable code. During system implementation, when an abstract system specification is left up to human interpretation, then this opens a possibility of undesirable behaviors being introduced into the final code, thereby nullifying all formal efforts. This manuscript addresses this issue and presents a set of transformation methods for systems described as a network to timed automata into Java code for distributed platforms. We prove that the presented transformation methods preserve guarantees of the source specifications, and therefore, result in code that is correct by construction.