Software Engineering Institute Carnegie Mellon

Architectural Description of the Simplex Architecture, An

Jose German Rivera
Alejandro Andres Danylyszyn
Charles B. Weinstock
Lui R. Sha
Michael J. Gagliardi

Technical Report
CMU/SEI-96-TR-006

PDF File

Simplex is a software architecture for dependable and evolvable process-control systems developed by the Software Engineering Institute. Our project consisted of creating a formal specification of this architecture, and analyzing its safety and liveness properties. We developed a Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) model to describe the overall dynamic behavior of the Simplex architecture, which we verified using the Failure-Divergence-Refinement (FDR) model checker. As a result, we discovered interesting things about the use of FDR that revealed subtle points in the Simplex architecture. We also developed a WRIGHT specification of this architecture to characterize precisely the connections between its components at the architectural level. The specification was based on the latest version of the CSP model.