SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

the requirement or design phases should reduce integration
and testing times significantly.
This work introduced a new approach, complemented
with a tool, to automatically check for consistency among
multiple formal specifications in LTL. The tool will help the
users discover inconsistencies among their specifications at
early stages. While the current tool is a stand-alone tool
that has been developed separately from Prospec, it is our
goal to integrate this tool with the latest release of Prospec
in order to encourage the use of Prospec.
Figure 8: Screen shot for Example 3
Example3 Figure 8 shows the screen shot of the LTL consistency
tool showing an inconsistency between the following
four LTL formulas:
• G(p → Fq)
• Fp
• G¬p
• (G¬r) ∨ ((¬r) Uq)
This latest example shows that the tool will distinguish
between the inconsistent formulas and others that do not
pose any inconsistency with other formulas. As such, the
tool reports that the first three formulas are inconsistent (as
described in Example 2) while the last formulas has no consistency
issues with other formulas and itself is a valid formula
(does accept certain execution traces).
6 Summary and Future Work
Formal verification techniques such as model checking
and theorem proving have been shown to increase system
dependability. These techniques verify system models
against formal specifications. As such, the success of
these techniques depends on the quality of developed systems
properties. Tools that assist in the generation of formal
specifications in LTL are important to the formal verification
community as they relieve the user from the burden
of writing specifications in a language that is hard to read
and write. Without the help of tools such as Prospec, the
user might create faulty specifications. These tools must
generate specifications that correspond to the intent of the
user. Prospec has demonstrated to provide such support
[15]. However, it is also important that tools like Prospec
generate specifications that are consistent with each other.
Discovering inconsistencies among specifications early in
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