Visual timed event scenarios

Formal description of real-time requirements is a difficult and error prone task. Conceptual and tool support for this activity plays a central role in the agenda of technology transference from the formal verification engineering community to the real-time systems development practice. In this article we present VTS, a visual language to define complex event-based requirements such as freshness, bounded response, event correlation, etc. The underlying formalism is based on partial orders and supports real-time constraints. The problem of checking whether a timed automaton model of a system satisfies these sort of scenarios is shown to be decidable. Moreover, we have also developed a tool that translates visually specified scenarios into observer timed automata. The resulting automata can be composed with a model under analysis in order to check satisfaction of the stated scenarios. We show the benefits of applying these ideas to some case studies.