The ARIES Simulation Component (ASC)

The ARIES Simulation Component (ASC) is a tool for the validation of behaviors described by an evolving specification which may be incomplete, inconsistent, and/or ambiguous. ASC does this by the formalization of an analyst's focus, the introduction of approximations to abstract away parts of the specification unrelated to the current focus, and the automated execution of a specification of various levels of abstraction with respect to this focus. This paper describes how ASC is able to bound a large and potentially incomplete behavior space of a specification under development in a well disciplined manner such that validation techniques (in this case simulation) which are most effective on small behavior spaces are tractable. This work is a step along a path toward the scaling of dynamic analysis techniques to real-world sized problems.<
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