The ARIES Simulation Component (ASC)

The ARIES Simulation Component (ASC) is a tool for the validation of behaviors described by an evolving specification which may be incomplete, inconsistent, and/or ambiguous. ASC does this by the formalization of an analyst´s focus, the introduction of approximations to abstract away parts of the specification unrelated to the current focus, and the automated execution of a specification of various levels of abstraction with respect to this focus. This paper describes how ASC is able to bound a large and potentially incomplete behavior space of a specification under development in a well disciplined manner such that validation techniques (in this case simulation) which are most effective on small behavior spaces are tractable. This work is a step along a path toward the scaling of dynamic analysis techniques to real-world sized problems