VIP: A Visual Interface for Promela

Moataz Kamel, Stefan Leue

Abstract: The Visual Interface to Promela (VIP) tool is a Java based graphical front end to the Promela specication language and the SPIN model checker [2]. VIP supports a visual formalism called v-Promela [3] which extends the Promela lan- guage with a graphical notation to describe structural and behavioral aspects of a system. v-Promela also introduces hierarchical modeling and object-oriented concepts. The formalism is largely consistent with the UML-RT proposal [5] which evolved from the Real-Time Object-Oriented Modeling (ROOM) language [4] and the Unied Modeling Language (UML) [1]. The structural part of a v- Promela model consists of structural elements called capsulesq and describes their interconnection and hierarchical nesting using a variant of UML collaboration diagrams. The behavioral aspects of a v-Promela model are described by hierar- chical communicating extended nite state machines and support such features as group transitions and optional return to history from group transitions.