Using transition systems to formalize a pattern for time dependable applications

This paper presents an example of the use of transition systems to formalize a pattern for soft real-time systems. The importance of this relies on the fact that this formalization can be used as a guide to a mapping from projects to transition systems based model-checkers. Since model-checking is a technique based on finite transition systems, this approach, currently, can only be applied to applications that do not modify dynamically the amount of interacting objects. Hence, the applicability of the pattern is limited to statically configurable systems. The pattern, namely MULTI-AUTOMATA, is presented through a variation of the GoF form. A high-level specification language used to instantiate the pattern is also presented. The high-level language respects the pattern semantics and is used to help the pattern utilization.