ProFeat: feature-oriented engineering for family-based probabilistic model checking

The concept of features provides an elegant way to specify families of systems. Given a base system, features encapsulate additional functionalities that can be activated or deactivated to enhance or restrict the base system’s behaviors. Features can also facilitate the analysis of families of systems by exploiting commonalities of the family members and performing an all-in-one analysis, where all systems of the family are analyzed at once on a single family model instead of one-by-one. Most prominent, the concept of features has been successfully applied to describe and analyze (software) product lines. We present the tool ProFeat that supports the feature-oriented engineering process for stochastic systems by probabilistic model checking. To describe families of stochastic systems, ProFeat extends models for the prominent probabilistic model checker Prism by feature-oriented concepts, including support for probabilistic product lines with dynamic feature switches, multi-features and feature attributes. ProFeat provides a compact symbolic representation of the analysis results for each family member obtained by Prism to support, e.g., model repair or refinement during feature-oriented development. By means of several case studies we show how ProFeat eases family-based quantitative analysis and compare one-by-one and all-in-one analysis approaches.

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