Symbolic Data Flow Analysis for Detecting Deadlocks in Ada Tasking Programs

It is well accepted that designing and analyzing concurrent software-components are tedious tasks. Assuring the quality of such software requires formal methods, which can statically detect deadlocks. This paper presents a symbolic data ow analysis framework for detecting deadlocks in Ada programs with tasks. The symbolic data ow framework is based on symbolic evaluation { an advanced technique to statically determine properties of programs. The framework can guarantee the deadlock-freeness for an arbitrary hardware environment. Our approach diiers from existing work in that tasks can be dynamically created and completed in the program. Examples are used to illustrate our approach.