Difference between pages "D45 Code Generation" and "D45 General Platform Maintenance"

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imported>Andy
 
imported>Jastram
 
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The Event-B method, and supporting tools have been developed during the DEPLOY project. A number of the industrial partners, are interested in the formal development of multi-tasking, embedded control systems. During the project, work has been undertaken to investigate automatic generation, from Event-B models, for these type of systems. Initially, we chose to translate to the Ada programming language, and use it as a basis for the abstractions used in our approach. The first version of the code generator supported translation to Ada, and the current version also has limited support for C.  
+
= Overview =
 +
The Rodin platform versions concerned by this deliverable are:
 +
* 2.1(08.02.2011),
 +
* 2.2(01.06.2011),
 +
* 2.2.2(01.08.2011),
 +
* 2.3(04.10.2011),
 +
* 2.4(31.01.2011),
 +
* 2.5(30.04.2011).
 +
This year, the maintenance carried on fixing identified bugs, although an emphasis was put on correcting usability issues. Indeed, during the annual meeting in Nice, the WP9 members agreed to refocus on the needed tasks to address some specific bugs and issues reported by DEPLOY partners, and wished resolved by the end of DEPLOY. Thus, no new features were implemented but those appearing in the description of work. The tasks to be performed by the WP9 members were then scheduled, prioritized and regularly updated during the WP9 bi-weekly meetings. The updates allowed to capture and integrate rapidly some minor changes to enhance the usability of the platform which were required by the DEPLOY partners. The following paragraphs will give an overview of the the work that has been performed concerning maintenance on the existing platform components (i.e. core platform and plug-ins).
  
−
We released a new version of the code generator on 21-03-2012. We have made changes to the methodology, user interface, and tooling. The code generators have been completely re-written. The translators are now implemented using Java only. In our previous work we attempted to make use of the latest model-to-model transformation technology, available in the Epsilon tool set, but we decided to revert to Java since Epsilon lacked the debugging and productivity features of the Eclipse Java editor. We have also updated the documentation, including the Tasking Event-B Overview, and Tutorial materials.  
+
See the Release Notes<ref name="documentation">http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/D32_General_Platform_Maintenance#Available_Documentation</ref> and the SourceForge<ref name=documentation>http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/D45_General_Platform_Maintenance#Available_Documentation</ref> databases (bugs and feature requests) for details about the previous and upcoming releases of the Rodin platform.
  
−
We described our previous code generation feature as a demonstrator tool; chiefly a tool designed as a proof of concept, used by us to validate the approach. In this sense, the tool as it stands now, is the first prototype intended to be used by developers. However, we can use the demonstrator as a baseline, and describe the new features as follows:
+
* General platform maintenance
 +
The maintenance done to overcome Rodin scalability weaknesses and enhance the proving experience will be detailed in a separate chapter. However, some features initially planned and some other which were later added and prioritized are worth to mention:
 +
:*Possibility to highlight patterns in the ProverUI,
 +
:*A better output providing warnings and errors in case of wrong or missing building configurations,
 +
:*The switch to Eclipse 3.7,
 +
:*A Handbook to complete and enhance the existing documentation.
  
 +
* {{TODO}} An overview of the contribution about Mathematical extensions / Theory Plug-in (Issam Maamria)
  
−
* Tasking Event-B is now integrated with the Event-B explorer. It uses the extensibility mechanism of Event-B EMF (In the previous version it was a separate model).
+
* {{TODO}} An overview of the contribution about Plug-in Incompatibilities (All partners)  
−
* We have the ability to translate to C and Ada source code, and the source code is placed in appropriate files within the project.
 
−
* We use theories to define translations of the Event-B mathematical language (Theories for Ada and C are supplied).
 
−
* We use the theory plug-in as a mechanism for defining new data types , and the translations to target data types.
 
−
* The Tasking Event-B to Event-B translator is fully integrated. The previous tool generated a copy of the project, but this is no longer the case.
 
−
* The translator is extensible.
 
−
* The Rose Editor is used for editing the Tasking Event-B. A text-based editor is provided, using the Rose extension, for editing the TaskBody.
 
−
* The composed machine component is used to store event 'synchronizations'.
 
−
* Minimal use is made of the EMF tree editor in Rose.
 
  
−
A text-based task body editor was added, to minimize the amount of editing required with the EMF tree editor. The task body editor is associated with a parser-builder; after the text is entered in the editor the EMF representation is generated (by clicking a button) that is, assuming parsing is successful. If the parser detects an error, information about the parse error is displayed in an adjoining text box. When specifying events in the task body, there is no longer a need to specify two events involved in a synchronization. The code generator automatically finds the corresponding event of a synchronization, based on the event name, and using the composed machine component. Composed machines are used to store event 'synchronizations', and are generated automatically during the decomposition process. This reduces the amount of typing in the TaskBody editor, since we no longer need to specify both local and remote (synchronizing) events.  The new feature also overcomes the 'problem' that we previously experienced, with duplicate event names in a development, and event selection, when specifying the task body. The EMF tree editor in Rose is now only used minimally; to add annotations for Tasking, Shared and Environ Machines; typing annotations, and parameter direction information; and sensing/actuating annotations, where necessary. Further work is under way to integrate the code generation feature with the new Rodin editor.
+
* {{TODO}} An overview of the contribution about Modularisation (Alexei Illiasov)
  
−
The code generation approach is now extensible; in that, new target language constructs can be added using the Eclipse extension mechanism. The translation of target's mathematical language is now specified in the theory plug-in. This improves clarity since the the translation from source to target is achieved by specifying pattern matching rules. The theory plug-in is used to specify new data-types, and how they are implemented. Translated code is deposited in a directory in the appropriate files. An Ada project file is generated for use with AdaCore's GPS workbench. Eventually this could be enabled/disabled in a preferences dialog box. The Tasking Event-B to Event-B translator is now properly integrated. Control variable updates to the Event-B model are made in a similar way to the equivalent updates in the state-machine plug-in. The additional elements are added to the Event-B model and marked as 'generated'. This prevents users from manually modifying them, and allows them to be removed through a menu choice.
+
* {{TODO}} An overview of the contribution about Decomposition (Renato Silva)
 +
 
 +
* {{TODO}} An overview of the contribution about Team-based Development (Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks)
 +
 
 +
* {{TODO}} An overview of the contribution about UML-B (Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks)
 +
 
 +
== An overview of the contribution about ProR (Michael Jastram) ==
 +
 
 +
ProR is a replacement of the original requirements plug-in, which got discontinued in 2010.  It is based on the OMG ReqIF standard (<ref name="reqif">http://www.omg.org/spec/ReqIF/</ref>), which provides interoperability with industry tools.  It evolved into the Eclipse Foundation project "Requirements Modeling Framework" (RMF, <ref name="rmf">http://eclipse.org/rmf</ref>), resulting in significant visibility.  ProR is independent from Rodin.  Integration is achieved with a separate plug-in that provides support for traceability and model integration.
 +
 
 +
= Motivations =
 +
The tasks to solve the issues faced by the DEPLOY partners have been listed and have been assigned to groups according to their priority. A high priority means a high need in the outcome of a given task. The group 1 has the highest priority, the group 2 has an intermediate priority, and the group 3 has the lowest priority. The group 4 concerns topics that could not be resourced during the lifetime of DEPLOY.The prover integrity item, although not being directly covered, has been partially addressed thanks to Isabelle and SMT integration. Unfortunately, the originally planned export of full proofs and integrity check was too ambitious to be fully achieved in the scope of DEPLOY.
 +
 
 +
{{SimpleHeader}}
 +
|-
 +
! scope=col | Group 1 (highest priority) || Responsible
 +
|-
 +
|Performance <br /> - Core (large models, etc.) <br /> - GUI (incl. prover UI, edition, etc.) || SYSTEREL
 +
|-
 +
|Prover Performances <br /> - New rewriting rules / inference rules <br /> - Automatic tactics (preferences, timeout, etc.) || SYSTEREL
 +
|-
 +
|ProB Disprover (incl. counter examples to DLF POs) || Düsseldorf
 +
|-
 +
|Stability (crash, corruption, etc.)  || SYSTEREL
 +
|-
 +
|Editors || SYSTEREL/Düsseldorf
 +
|-
 +
|}
 +
{{SimpleHeader}}
 +
|-
 +
! scope=col | Group 2 || Responsible
 +
|-
 +
| Prover Performances <br /> - SMT provers integration <br /> - connection with Isabelle  <br /> - Mathematical extensions <br /> - ProB || <br />SYSTEREL <br /> ETH Zürich <br /> Southampton/SYSTEREL <br /> Düsseldorf
 +
|-
 +
|Scalability <br /> - Decomposition <br /> - Modularisation plug-in <br /> - Team-based development || <br /> Southampton <br /> Newcastle <br /> Southampton
 +
|-
 +
|Plug-in incompatibilities || Newcastle
 +
|-
 +
|Model-based testing || Pitesti/Düsseldorf
 +
|-
 +
|ProR || Düsseldorf
 +
|}
 +
{{SimpleHeader}}
 +
|-
 +
! scope=col | Group 3 || Responsible
 +
|-
 +
|Scalability <br /> - Generic instantiation <br /> - UML-B maintenance <br /> || <br /> Southampton <br /> ETH Zürich/Southampton
 +
|-
 +
|Code Generation || Southampton
 +
|}
 +
{{SimpleHeader}}
 +
|-
 +
! scope=col | Group 4
 +
|-
 +
|Prover Integrity
 +
|-
 +
|Integrity of Code Generation
 +
|}
 +
== Platform maintenance ==
 +
The platform maintenance, as it can be deduced from the above tables in section [[#Motivations | Motivations]], mainly concerned stability and performance improvement. These topics will be discussed and detailed in a separate chapter about scalability improvements.<br>
 +
However, other improvements of utmost importance were made on the platform. These improvements either came from DEPLOY partners specific needs, or were corresponding to previously identified needs (listed in D32 - Model Construction tools & Analysis III Deliverable).
 +
Hence we review below the motivations of some noteworthy implemented features:
 +
* A Possibility to highlight patterns in the Prover UI.
 +
This feature came from a request of DEPLOY partners<ref name="searchInPUI">https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=651672&aid=3092835&group_id=108850</ref>, often facing the need to find particular patterns such as expressions in long predicates (e.g. long goals). Since Rodin 2.2, and its new Proving UI interface, a nice feature was added, allowing to search and highlight a string pattern into the whole Proving UI views and editors. This function as also been enabled on direct selection of text in this UI.
 +
* A better output providing warnings and errors in case of wrong or missing building configurations.
 +
This issue, often seen as a bug or as a plug-in incompatibility, was raised when a user imports and tries to use a model on a platform with some missing required plug-ins. The user often thought his models corrupted whereas Rodin was not able to build them, and hid this information to the user. This is why, since Rodin 2.3, an output has been provided in such case, taking the form of warnings or errors that any user can understand and review. This is a first answer to Rodin plug-in incompatibilities issues.
 +
* The switch to Eclipse 3.7.
 +
Due to the major improvements made every year in Eclipse releases and the continuously growing number of contributing projects which are for some of them used as basis for Rodin plug-ins, the Rodin platform follows the evolution and is adapted every year quickly to the latest Eclipse version available. This year, Rodin 2.3 originated the switch from Eclipse 3.6 to Eclipse 3.7.
 +
* A Handbook to complete and enhance the existing documentation.
 +
At the DEPLOY Plenary Meeting in Zürich in 2010, it has been stated that the current documentation, in its state at that time, would not support a engineer starting using the tools without significant help of an expert <ref name="documentationoverhaul>http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/User_Documentation_Overhaul</ref>. Significant efforts to improve the documentation were performed and coordinated by Düsseldorf, and took form of a handbook<ref name="RodinHandbook">http://handbook.event-b.org/</ref>. The Rodin handbook has the aim to minimize the access to an expert, by providing the necessary assistance to an engineer in the need to be productive using Event-B and the Rodin toolset. The contents of the handbook, user oriented, were originated by some contents of the Event-B wiki.
 +
 
 +
== Mathematical extensions / Theory Plug-in ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Issam Maamria''
 +
== Plug-in Incompatibilities ==
 +
By its extensibility nature, the Rodin platform is susceptible to incompatibilities. Indeed, there are many ways in which incompatibilities could occur, and it occurred in the lifetime of DEPLOY. A good example, is the dependency management. Suppose that a bundle x_v1.0 is needed by a plug-in A (i.e. a dependency from A has been defined to x in at most the version 1.0) and installed in Rodin. Then the plug-in x_v1.1 is needed by a plug-in B. The both versions 1.0 and 1.1 of x could not be installed and used at the same time and create thus some usage incompatibility.
 +
 
 +
== Modularisation ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Alexei Illiasov''
 +
== Decomposition ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Renato Silva'' 
 +
== Team-based Development ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks''
 +
== UML-B ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks''
 +
== ProR ==
 +
 
 +
While the original requirements plug-in for Rodin was useful as a prototype, a number of shortcomings lead to a new development.  In particular, the original plug-in was a traceability tool with externally managed requirements.  With ProR, requirements are authored and edited within Eclipse.  The original plug-in supported only a limited number of attributes and flat (unstructured) requirements.  ProR supports all data structures that the ReqIF standard<ref name="reqif">http://www.omg.org/spec/ReqIF/</ref> supports. Further, ReqIF-support for industry tools like Rational DOORS, MKS or IRqA is expected in the near future, while the original plug-in required a custom adaptor for each data format.
 +
 
 +
ProR is developed independently from Rodin.  Dependencies to Rodin exist only in the Rodin integration plug-in.  This significantly decreases the maintenance effort for the integration plugin, while increasing the visibility of ProR in the Open Source community.  The move of ProR from the University of Düsseldorf to the Eclipse Foundation increases visibility even further. The Rodin integration plug-in is maintained as an independent project at github.
 +
 
 +
= Choices / Decisions =
 +
== Platform maintenance ==
 +
* Revisited task priority
 +
This year, the process of giving priority to maintenance tasks was revisited according the the refocus mentioned above. The aim was to address all the major scalability issues before the end of DEPLOY. Thus, the requests coming from DEPLOY partners were given high priorities, and they were also prioritized against the already planned tasks coming from both DEPLOY partners and the Description of Work.
 +
* Keep 32-bit versions of the Rodin platform on linux and windows systems
 +
It was asked by end users to make both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Rodin platform available for Linux and Windows platforms. Only a 64-bit version of Rodin is available on Mac platforms as 32-bit Mac (early 2006) platforms are no longer maintained. The request to offer 64-bit was motivated by the possibility to increase for them the available Java heap size for some memory greedy platforms (these before 2.3). However, the drawbacks of assembling and maintaining more platforms (5 platforms instead of 3) and the corrections brought to the database which improved the memory consumption pushed away the limitations of the platform, made this request not relevant for now.
 +
 
 +
== Mathematical extensions / Theory Plug-in ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Issam Maamria''
 +
== Plug-in Incompatibilities ==
 +
It has been decided in cooperation with all the WP9 partners to find better ways to address the plug-in incompatibility issues. First of all, the various partners refined the concept of "plug-in incompatibility". Hence, various aspects could be identified and some specific answers were given to each of them. The user could then defined more clearly the incompatibility faced. Plug-in incompatibilities can be separated in two categories:
 +
:* Rodin platform/plug-in incompatibilities, due to some wrong match between Rodin included packages and the plug-in dependencies (i.e. needed packages). These incompatibilities, when reported, allowed the plug-in developers to contact SYSTEREL in charge of managing the packages shipped with a given version of Rodin. It could also allow traceability of incompatibilities and information to the user through a specific and actualized table on each Rodin release notes page on the Wiki<ref name="incompTableA">http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/Rodin_Platform_Releases#Current_plug-ins</ref>.
 +
:* Plug-in/plug-in incompatibilities, due to some wrong match between needed/installed packages, or API/resources incompatible usage. A table was created on each release notes wiki page, and a procedure was defined<ref name="incompTableB">http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/Rodin_Platform_Releases#Known_plug-in_incompatibilities</ref> so that identified incompatibilities are listed and corrected by the concerned developers.
 +
It appeared that cases of using a model which references some missing plug-ins were formerly often seen as compatibility issues although they were not.<br>
 +
After the incompatibilities have been identified, the developing counterparts being concerned assigned special tasks and coordination to solve issues the soonest as possible. Incompatibilities are often due to little glitches or desynchronisation and such direct coordination of counterpart appeared appropriate because quick and effective.
 +
 
 +
== Modularisation ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Alexei Illiasov''
 +
== Decomposition ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Renato Silva'' 
 +
== Team-based Development ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks''
 +
== UML-B ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks''
 +
== ProR ==
 +
 
 +
The following key decisions were made when developing ProR:
 +
 
 +
* '''New development, rather than continuing the original plug-in''' - the architecture of ProR differs significantly from that of the original plug-in (see [[D45_General_Platform_Maintenance#ProR]].  In addition, new technologies like EMF promised a cleaner, more powerful framework for an implementation.
 +
 
 +
* '''ReqIF as the underlying data model''' - the ReqIF standard <ref name="reqif">http://www.omg.org/spec/ReqIF/</ref> is gaining traction and promises interoperability with industry tools.  In addition, a digital version of the data model was available for free and could serve as the foundation for the model code.
 +
 
 +
* '''The Eclipse Modeling Framework''' (EMF) was identified as a technology that would allow a quick and clean foundation for an implementation.  Further, the Rodin EMF-plug-in represents a convenient interface for integrating ProR and ProB.  Last, the digital data model from the OMG could be imported directly into EMF and used for generating the model code.
 +
 
 +
* '''Keeping ProR independent from Rodin''' - There is significant interest in ReqIF right now, but this interest is unrelated to formal methods.  By providing an implementation that is independent from Rodin, we have a much larger target group of potential users and developers.  By carefully designing extension points, we can still provide a powerful Rodin integration.
 +
 
 +
* '''Eclipse Foundation Project''' - we were actively establishing an open source community around ProR.  By recruiting engaged partners early on, development progressed faster than anticipated.  By becoming an Eclipse Foundation project <ref name="rmf">http://eclipse.org/rmf</ref>, we exceeded our goals in this respect.
 +
 
 +
= Available Documentation =
 +
* Core platform:
 +
:The following pages give useful information about the Rodin platform releases:
 +
:* Release notes<ref>http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/Rodin_Platform_Releases</ref>.
 +
:* Bugs<ref>https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=108850&atid=651669</ref>.
 +
:* Feature requests<ref>https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=108850&atid=651672</ref>.
 +
*The Rodin handbook is proposed as a PDF version and a HTML version and a dedicated plug-in makes it available as help within Rodin<ref name="RodinHandbook">http://handbook.event-b.org/</ref>.
 +
 
 +
*{{TODO}}  Links for Mathematical extensions / Theory Plug-in
 +
*{{TODO}}  Links for Modularisation
 +
*{{TODO}}  Links for Decomposition
 +
*{{TODO}}  Links for Team-based Development
 +
*{{TODO}}  Links for UML-B
 +
* Links for ProR
 +
** ProR at the Eclipse Foundation <ref name="rmf">http://eclipse.org/rmf</ref>
 +
** ProR Documentation for end users and plugin developers <ref>http://pror.org</ref>
 +
 
 +
= Status =
 +
== Platform maintenance ==
 +
By the end of the project, there are :
 +
* xx bugs reported and open. All with a priority lower or equal to 5.
 +
* xx feature requests expressed and still open.
 +
 
 +
== Mathematical extensions / Theory Plug-in ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Issam Maamria''
 +
== Plug-in Incompatibilities ==
 +
As the time of writing this deliverable, no plug-in incompatibilities are left or known to exist between the platform and plug-ins or between plug-ins.
 +
 
 +
== Modularisation ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Alexei Illiasov''
 +
== Decomposition ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Renato Silva'' 
 +
== Team-based Development ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks''
 +
== UML-B ==
 +
{{TODO}} ''To be completed by Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks''
 +
== ProR ==
 +
 
 +
ProR took on a life on its own as part of the Requirements Modeling Framework<ref name="rmf">http://eclipse.org/rmf</ref>.  It is currently in the incubation stage of an Eclipse project.  There are currently five committers in total, with two from the Rodin project, namely Michael Jastram (Project Lead) and Lukas Ladenberger.
 +
 
 +
The Rodin integration supports:
 +
 
 +
* Creating traces between model elements and requirements
 +
* Highlighting of model elements in the requirements text
 +
* Marking of invalidated traces, where either the requirement or model element had changed.
 +
 
 +
The Rodin integration is hosted at GitHub.
 +
 
 +
= References =
 +
<references/>
 +
 
 +
[[Category:D45 Deliverable]]

Revision as of 15:44, 13 February 2012

Overview

The Rodin platform versions concerned by this deliverable are:

  • 2.1(08.02.2011),
  • 2.2(01.06.2011),
  • 2.2.2(01.08.2011),
  • 2.3(04.10.2011),
  • 2.4(31.01.2011),
  • 2.5(30.04.2011).

This year, the maintenance carried on fixing identified bugs, although an emphasis was put on correcting usability issues. Indeed, during the annual meeting in Nice, the WP9 members agreed to refocus on the needed tasks to address some specific bugs and issues reported by DEPLOY partners, and wished resolved by the end of DEPLOY. Thus, no new features were implemented but those appearing in the description of work. The tasks to be performed by the WP9 members were then scheduled, prioritized and regularly updated during the WP9 bi-weekly meetings. The updates allowed to capture and integrate rapidly some minor changes to enhance the usability of the platform which were required by the DEPLOY partners. The following paragraphs will give an overview of the the work that has been performed concerning maintenance on the existing platform components (i.e. core platform and plug-ins).

See the Release Notes[1] and the SourceForge[1] databases (bugs and feature requests) for details about the previous and upcoming releases of the Rodin platform.

  • General platform maintenance

The maintenance done to overcome Rodin scalability weaknesses and enhance the proving experience will be detailed in a separate chapter. However, some features initially planned and some other which were later added and prioritized are worth to mention:

  • Possibility to highlight patterns in the ProverUI,
  • A better output providing warnings and errors in case of wrong or missing building configurations,
  • The switch to Eclipse 3.7,
  • A Handbook to complete and enhance the existing documentation.
  • TODO An overview of the contribution about Mathematical extensions / Theory Plug-in (Issam Maamria)
  • TODO An overview of the contribution about Plug-in Incompatibilities (All partners)
  • TODO An overview of the contribution about Modularisation (Alexei Illiasov)
  • TODO An overview of the contribution about Decomposition (Renato Silva)
  • TODO An overview of the contribution about Team-based Development (Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks)
  • TODO An overview of the contribution about UML-B (Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks)

An overview of the contribution about ProR (Michael Jastram)

ProR is a replacement of the original requirements plug-in, which got discontinued in 2010. It is based on the OMG ReqIF standard ([2]), which provides interoperability with industry tools. It evolved into the Eclipse Foundation project "Requirements Modeling Framework" (RMF, [3]), resulting in significant visibility. ProR is independent from Rodin. Integration is achieved with a separate plug-in that provides support for traceability and model integration.

Motivations

The tasks to solve the issues faced by the DEPLOY partners have been listed and have been assigned to groups according to their priority. A high priority means a high need in the outcome of a given task. The group 1 has the highest priority, the group 2 has an intermediate priority, and the group 3 has the lowest priority. The group 4 concerns topics that could not be resourced during the lifetime of DEPLOY.The prover integrity item, although not being directly covered, has been partially addressed thanks to Isabelle and SMT integration. Unfortunately, the originally planned export of full proofs and integrity check was too ambitious to be fully achieved in the scope of DEPLOY.


Group 1 (highest priority) Responsible
Performance
- Core (large models, etc.)
- GUI (incl. prover UI, edition, etc.)		 SYSTEREL
Prover Performances
- New rewriting rules / inference rules
- Automatic tactics (preferences, timeout, etc.)		 SYSTEREL
ProB Disprover (incl. counter examples to DLF POs) Düsseldorf
Stability (crash, corruption, etc.) SYSTEREL
Editors SYSTEREL/Düsseldorf
Group 2 Responsible
Prover Performances
- SMT provers integration
- connection with Isabelle
- Mathematical extensions
- ProB
SYSTEREL
ETH Zürich
Southampton/SYSTEREL
Düsseldorf
Scalability
- Decomposition
- Modularisation plug-in
- Team-based development
Southampton
Newcastle
Southampton
Plug-in incompatibilities Newcastle
Model-based testing Pitesti/Düsseldorf
ProR Düsseldorf
Group 3 Responsible
Scalability
- Generic instantiation
- UML-B maintenance

Southampton
ETH Zürich/Southampton
Code Generation Southampton
Group 4
Prover Integrity
Integrity of Code Generation

Platform maintenance

The platform maintenance, as it can be deduced from the above tables in section Motivations, mainly concerned stability and performance improvement. These topics will be discussed and detailed in a separate chapter about scalability improvements.
However, other improvements of utmost importance were made on the platform. These improvements either came from DEPLOY partners specific needs, or were corresponding to previously identified needs (listed in D32 - Model Construction tools & Analysis III Deliverable). Hence we review below the motivations of some noteworthy implemented features:

  • A Possibility to highlight patterns in the Prover UI.

This feature came from a request of DEPLOY partners[4], often facing the need to find particular patterns such as expressions in long predicates (e.g. long goals). Since Rodin 2.2, and its new Proving UI interface, a nice feature was added, allowing to search and highlight a string pattern into the whole Proving UI views and editors. This function as also been enabled on direct selection of text in this UI.

  • A better output providing warnings and errors in case of wrong or missing building configurations.

This issue, often seen as a bug or as a plug-in incompatibility, was raised when a user imports and tries to use a model on a platform with some missing required plug-ins. The user often thought his models corrupted whereas Rodin was not able to build them, and hid this information to the user. This is why, since Rodin 2.3, an output has been provided in such case, taking the form of warnings or errors that any user can understand and review. This is a first answer to Rodin plug-in incompatibilities issues.

  • The switch to Eclipse 3.7.

Due to the major improvements made every year in Eclipse releases and the continuously growing number of contributing projects which are for some of them used as basis for Rodin plug-ins, the Rodin platform follows the evolution and is adapted every year quickly to the latest Eclipse version available. This year, Rodin 2.3 originated the switch from Eclipse 3.6 to Eclipse 3.7.

  • A Handbook to complete and enhance the existing documentation.

At the DEPLOY Plenary Meeting in Zürich in 2010, it has been stated that the current documentation, in its state at that time, would not support a engineer starting using the tools without significant help of an expert [5]. Significant efforts to improve the documentation were performed and coordinated by Düsseldorf, and took form of a handbook[6]. The Rodin handbook has the aim to minimize the access to an expert, by providing the necessary assistance to an engineer in the need to be productive using Event-B and the Rodin toolset. The contents of the handbook, user oriented, were originated by some contents of the Event-B wiki.

Mathematical extensions / Theory Plug-in

TODO To be completed by Issam Maamria

Plug-in Incompatibilities

By its extensibility nature, the Rodin platform is susceptible to incompatibilities. Indeed, there are many ways in which incompatibilities could occur, and it occurred in the lifetime of DEPLOY. A good example, is the dependency management. Suppose that a bundle x_v1.0 is needed by a plug-in A (i.e. a dependency from A has been defined to x in at most the version 1.0) and installed in Rodin. Then the plug-in x_v1.1 is needed by a plug-in B. The both versions 1.0 and 1.1 of x could not be installed and used at the same time and create thus some usage incompatibility.

Modularisation

TODO To be completed by Alexei Illiasov

Decomposition

TODO To be completed by Renato Silva

Team-based Development

TODO To be completed by Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks

UML-B

TODO To be completed by Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks

ProR

While the original requirements plug-in for Rodin was useful as a prototype, a number of shortcomings lead to a new development. In particular, the original plug-in was a traceability tool with externally managed requirements. With ProR, requirements are authored and edited within Eclipse. The original plug-in supported only a limited number of attributes and flat (unstructured) requirements. ProR supports all data structures that the ReqIF standard[2] supports. Further, ReqIF-support for industry tools like Rational DOORS, MKS or IRqA is expected in the near future, while the original plug-in required a custom adaptor for each data format.

ProR is developed independently from Rodin. Dependencies to Rodin exist only in the Rodin integration plug-in. This significantly decreases the maintenance effort for the integration plugin, while increasing the visibility of ProR in the Open Source community. The move of ProR from the University of Düsseldorf to the Eclipse Foundation increases visibility even further. The Rodin integration plug-in is maintained as an independent project at github.

Choices / Decisions

Platform maintenance

  • Revisited task priority

This year, the process of giving priority to maintenance tasks was revisited according the the refocus mentioned above. The aim was to address all the major scalability issues before the end of DEPLOY. Thus, the requests coming from DEPLOY partners were given high priorities, and they were also prioritized against the already planned tasks coming from both DEPLOY partners and the Description of Work.

  • Keep 32-bit versions of the Rodin platform on linux and windows systems

It was asked by end users to make both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Rodin platform available for Linux and Windows platforms. Only a 64-bit version of Rodin is available on Mac platforms as 32-bit Mac (early 2006) platforms are no longer maintained. The request to offer 64-bit was motivated by the possibility to increase for them the available Java heap size for some memory greedy platforms (these before 2.3). However, the drawbacks of assembling and maintaining more platforms (5 platforms instead of 3) and the corrections brought to the database which improved the memory consumption pushed away the limitations of the platform, made this request not relevant for now.

Mathematical extensions / Theory Plug-in

TODO To be completed by Issam Maamria

Plug-in Incompatibilities

It has been decided in cooperation with all the WP9 partners to find better ways to address the plug-in incompatibility issues. First of all, the various partners refined the concept of "plug-in incompatibility". Hence, various aspects could be identified and some specific answers were given to each of them. The user could then defined more clearly the incompatibility faced. Plug-in incompatibilities can be separated in two categories:

  • Rodin platform/plug-in incompatibilities, due to some wrong match between Rodin included packages and the plug-in dependencies (i.e. needed packages). These incompatibilities, when reported, allowed the plug-in developers to contact SYSTEREL in charge of managing the packages shipped with a given version of Rodin. It could also allow traceability of incompatibilities and information to the user through a specific and actualized table on each Rodin release notes page on the Wiki[7].
  • Plug-in/plug-in incompatibilities, due to some wrong match between needed/installed packages, or API/resources incompatible usage. A table was created on each release notes wiki page, and a procedure was defined[8] so that identified incompatibilities are listed and corrected by the concerned developers.

It appeared that cases of using a model which references some missing plug-ins were formerly often seen as compatibility issues although they were not.
After the incompatibilities have been identified, the developing counterparts being concerned assigned special tasks and coordination to solve issues the soonest as possible. Incompatibilities are often due to little glitches or desynchronisation and such direct coordination of counterpart appeared appropriate because quick and effective.

Modularisation

TODO To be completed by Alexei Illiasov

Decomposition

TODO To be completed by Renato Silva

Team-based Development

TODO To be completed by Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks

UML-B

TODO To be completed by Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks

ProR

The following key decisions were made when developing ProR:

  • New development, rather than continuing the original plug-in - the architecture of ProR differs significantly from that of the original plug-in (see D45_General_Platform_Maintenance#ProR. In addition, new technologies like EMF promised a cleaner, more powerful framework for an implementation.
  • ReqIF as the underlying data model - the ReqIF standard [2] is gaining traction and promises interoperability with industry tools. In addition, a digital version of the data model was available for free and could serve as the foundation for the model code.
  • The Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) was identified as a technology that would allow a quick and clean foundation for an implementation. Further, the Rodin EMF-plug-in represents a convenient interface for integrating ProR and ProB. Last, the digital data model from the OMG could be imported directly into EMF and used for generating the model code.
  • Keeping ProR independent from Rodin - There is significant interest in ReqIF right now, but this interest is unrelated to formal methods. By providing an implementation that is independent from Rodin, we have a much larger target group of potential users and developers. By carefully designing extension points, we can still provide a powerful Rodin integration.
  • Eclipse Foundation Project - we were actively establishing an open source community around ProR. By recruiting engaged partners early on, development progressed faster than anticipated. By becoming an Eclipse Foundation project [3], we exceeded our goals in this respect.

Available Documentation

  • Core platform:
The following pages give useful information about the Rodin platform releases:
  • The Rodin handbook is proposed as a PDF version and a HTML version and a dedicated plug-in makes it available as help within Rodin[6].
  • TODO Links for Mathematical extensions / Theory Plug-in
  • TODO Links for Modularisation
  • TODO Links for Decomposition
  • TODO Links for Team-based Development
  • TODO Links for UML-B
  • Links for ProR
    • ProR at the Eclipse Foundation [3]
    • ProR Documentation for end users and plugin developers [12]

Status

Platform maintenance

By the end of the project, there are :

  • xx bugs reported and open. All with a priority lower or equal to 5.
  • xx feature requests expressed and still open.

Mathematical extensions / Theory Plug-in

TODO To be completed by Issam Maamria

Plug-in Incompatibilities

As the time of writing this deliverable, no plug-in incompatibilities are left or known to exist between the platform and plug-ins or between plug-ins.

Modularisation

TODO To be completed by Alexei Illiasov

Decomposition

TODO To be completed by Renato Silva

Team-based Development

TODO To be completed by Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks

UML-B

TODO To be completed by Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks

ProR

ProR took on a life on its own as part of the Requirements Modeling Framework[3]. It is currently in the incubation stage of an Eclipse project. There are currently five committers in total, with two from the Rodin project, namely Michael Jastram (Project Lead) and Lukas Ladenberger.

The Rodin integration supports:

  • Creating traces between model elements and requirements
  • Highlighting of model elements in the requirements text
  • Marking of invalidated traces, where either the requirement or model element had changed.

The Rodin integration is hosted at GitHub.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/D32_General_Platform_Maintenance#Available_Documentation Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name "documentation" defined multiple times with different content
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 http://www.omg.org/spec/ReqIF/
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 http://eclipse.org/rmf
  4. ↑ https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=651672&aid=3092835&group_id=108850
  5. ↑ http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/User_Documentation_Overhaul
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 http://handbook.event-b.org/
  7. ↑ http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/Rodin_Platform_Releases#Current_plug-ins
  8. ↑ http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/Rodin_Platform_Releases#Known_plug-in_incompatibilities
  9. ↑ http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/Rodin_Platform_Releases
  10. ↑ https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=108850&atid=651669
  11. ↑ https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=108850&atid=651672
  12. ↑ http://pror.org
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