Product-Line Approach for Families of Program Translators

Organisation:	Université Catholique of Louvain (BELGIUM)
Functionality	Automated generation of translators and checking of program transformations.
Tools used:	CADP (Construction and Analysis of Distributed Processes)
Domain:	Space-Mission Planning
Period:	2008-2010
Description:	In the domain of space-mission planning, a family of languages is used to describe the control and operation of spacecrafts. As the cost of developping a dedicated translator for any pair of languages is prohibitive, a product-line approach is proposed. This approach exploits the fact that such a family of languages shares a lot of commonalities to propose a generic to build translators for any pair of languages in the family. Each translator is defined by a several program transformations. Moreover, a verification technique to check the correctness of a program translation is proposed. The correctness-check of a program translation consists of four steps. First, for both programs (the original one and the translated one) a CFG (Control-Flow Graph) representation is constructed. Second, both CFGs are encoded as LTSs (Labeled Transition Systems). Third, the LTSs are compared with respect to observational equivalence (weak bisimulation) using BISIMULATOR. If the programs are not equivalent, the counter-example is mapped back to the CFG and the source program.
Conclusions:	The author reports that: BISIMULATOR "is a solid and performant verification tool with many functionalities", "[augmenting the number of transitions in the LTS] is something the CADP Bisimulator seems to handle without any problem, eliminating one of the technical problems that similar studies were having", "The verification tool proved to be useful not only as the final step in the translation, testing the resulting procedures. It is useful also while building the translators, as a debugging tool."
Publications:	[Ordonez-10] Diego Antonio Ordonez Camacho. A Product-Line for Families of Program Translators: A Grammar-Based Approach. PhD thesis, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, August 2010. Available on-line at: https://dial.uclouvain.be/pr/boreal/object/boreal:33289 or from the CADP Web site in PDF or PostScript
Contact:	Diego Ordóñez Camacho Pôle d'Ingénierie Informatique Institute for Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics Université catholique de Louvain Place Sainte-Barbe, 2 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve Belgium
Further remarks:	This tool, amongst others, is described on the CADP Web site: http://cadp.inria.fr/software

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