Friday 8 June 2012

Regular Expression Sub-Matching using Partial Derivatives

Regular expression sub-matching is the problem of finding for each sub-part of a regular expression a matching sub-string. Prior work applies Thompson and Glushkov NFA methods for the construction of the matching automata. We propose the novel use of derivatives and partial derivatives for regular expression sub-matching. Our benchmarking results show that the run-time performance is promising and that our approach can be applied in practice.

Here's a link to the paper and the implementation.

This is the substantially revised and almost completely re-written (paper and implementation) version of our earlier draft.

Monday 4 June 2012

Constructive Finite Trace Analysis with Linear Temporal Logic

We consider linear temporal logic (LTL) for run-time testing over limited time periods. The technical challenge is to check if the finite trace produced by the system under test matches the LTL property. We present a constructive solution to this problem. Our finite trace LTL matching algorithm yields a proof explaining why a match exists. We apply our constructive LTL matching method to check if LTL properties are sufficiently covered by traces resulting from tests.

The paper appeared in TAP'12. Here's a link to the paper and the talk.

The system has been implemented in Haskell and is applied in some real-world projects. Some of the Haskell source code will be made publicly available (later in the year).