Verifying Scenario-Based Aspect Specifications

Software systems specifications are often described as a set of typical scenarios. Some of the desired scenarios are crosscut by other requirements, called aspects, also naturally described as scenarios. Aspect descriptions are independent of the description of the non-aspectual scenarios, but the crosscutting relationship between them has to be specified, so for each aspect a description of its join-points is provided. When aspectual scenarios are added to the system, we need to prove that every execution is equivalent to one in which the aspectual scenarios occur as blocks of operations immediately at their join-points, and all the other operations form a sequence of non-aspectual scenarios, interrupted only by the aspectual scenarios. We extend an existing method of automatic verification for non-aspect systems to the case of systems with scenario-based aspect specifications. A prototype implementation based on Cadence SMV is also extended accordingly.