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Checking Activity Transition Systems with Back Transitions Against Assertions

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Formal Methods and Software Engineering (ICFEM 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11232))

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Abstract

The Android system is in widespread use currently, and Android apps play an important role in our daily life. How to specify and verify apps is a challenging problem. In this paper, we study a formalism for abstracting the behaviour of Android apps, called Activity Transition Systems (ATS), which includes back transitions, value assignments and assertions. Given such a transition system with a corresponding Activity Transition Graph (ATG), it is interesting to know whether it violates some value assertions. We first prove some theoretical properties of transitions and propose a state-merging strategy. Then we further introduce a post-reachability graph technique. Based on this technique, we design an algorithm to traverse an ATG that avoids path cycles. Lastly, we also extend our model and our algorithm to handle more complicated problems.

This work is partially supported by the National Key Basic Research (973) Program of China (Grant No.2014CB340701), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61672505), and the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS (Grant No. QYZDJ-SSW-JSC036).

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions, and to Ping Wang for reading a preliminary version of this paper carefully.

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Correspondence to Jiwei Yan or Jian Zhang .

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Ge, C., Yan, J., Yan, J., Zhang, J. (2018). Checking Activity Transition Systems with Back Transitions Against Assertions. In: Sun, J., Sun, M. (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering. ICFEM 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11232. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02450-5_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02450-5_23

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