Software Engineering Institute

Component technologies are gaining acceptance in the software community as effective tools for quickly assembling increasingly complex systems from components. Most of the current component technologies, however, fail to help developers predict important software qualities like performance, safety, and reliability. A prediction-enabled component technology (PECT) augments the capabilities of a component technology with one or more reasoning frameworks that package quality specific analyses and the means to apply them to component-based systems. Model checking is an automated approach for exhaustively analyzing whether systems satisfy specific behavioral claims that can be used to characterize safety and reliability requirements. This technical note describes ComFoRT, a reasoning framework that packages the effectiveness of state-of-the-art model checking in a form that enables users to apply the analysis technique without being experts in its use, and its incorporation in a PECT.