Transaction flows and executable models: formalization and analysis of message-passing protocols

The lack of appropriate models is often the biggest hurdle in applying formal methods in the industry. Creating executable models of industrial designs is a challenging task, one that we believe has not been sufficiently addressed by existing research. We address this problem for distributed message passing protocols by showing how to synthesize executable models of such protocols from transaction message flows, which are readily available in architecture descriptions. We present industrial case studies showing that this approach to creating formal models is effective in practice. We also show that going the other way, i.e., extracting flows from executable models, is at least as hard as the model-checking problem. These results indicate that transaction flows may provide a superior approach to capture design intent than executable models.