Verifying temporal specifications of Java programs

TL;DR: This work shows how to exploit modern SMT solvers together with static analysis in order to produce a network of timed automata approximating the temporal behavior of a set of Java threads, and proves that the presented abstraction preserves the truth of MTL and ATCTL formulae, two well-known logics for expressing timed specifications.

Abstract: Many Java programs encode temporal behaviors in their source code, typically mixing three features provided by the Java language: (1) pausing the execution for a limited amount of time, (2) waiting for an event that has to occur before a deadline expires, and (3) comparing timestamps. In this work, we show how to exploit modern SMT solvers together with static analysis in order to produce a network of timed automata approximating the temporal behavior of a set of Java threads. We also prove that the presented abstraction preserves the truth of MTL and ATCTL formulae, two well-known logics for expressing timed specifications. As far as we know, this is the first feasible approach enabling the user to automatically model check timed specifications of Java software directly from the source code.