Efficient property preservation checking of model refinements

In model-driven software development, models and model refinements are used to create software. To automatically generate correct software from abstract models by means of model refinement, desirable properties of the initial models must be preserved. We propose an explicit-state model checking technique to determine whether refinements are property preserving. We use networks of labelled transition systems (LTSs) to represent models with concurrent components, and formalise refinements as systems of LTS transformation rules. Property preservation checking involves determining how a rule system relates to an input network, and checking bisimilarity between behaviour subjected to transformation and the corresponding behaviour after transformation. In this way, one avoids generating the entire LTS of the new model. Experimental results demonstrate speedups of several orders of magnitude.