Towards Automated Input Generation for Sketching Alloy Models

Writing declarative models has numerous benefits, ranging from automated reasoning and correction of design-level properties before systems are built, to automated testing and debugging of their implementations after they are built. Alloy is a declarative modeling language that is well suited for verifying system designs. While Alloy comes deployed in the Analyzer, an automated scenario-finding tool set, writing correct models remains a difficult and error-prone task. ASketch is a synthesis framework that helps users build their Alloy models. ASketch takes as an input a partial Alloy models with holes and an A Unit test suite. As output, ASketch returns a completed model that passes all tests. ASketch’s initial evaluation reveals ASketch to be a promising approach to synthesize Alloy models. In this paper, we present and explore SketchGen
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, an approach that looks to broaden the adoption of ASketch by increasing the automation of the inputs needed for the sketching process. Experimental results show SketchGen
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is effective at producing both expressions and test suites for synthesis.