Symbolic Termination and Confluence Checking for ECA Rules

Event-condition-action (ECA) rules can specify decision processes and are widely used in reactive systems and active database systems. Applying formal verification techniques to guarantee properties of the designed ECA rules is essential to help the error-prone procedure of collecting and translating expert knowledge. However, while the nondeterministic and concurrent semantics of ECA rule execution enhances expressiveness, it also makes analysis and verification more difficult. We propose an approach to analyze the dynamic behavior of a set of ECA rules, by first translating them into an extended Petri net, then studying two fundamental correctness properties: termination and confluence. Our experimental results show that the symbolic algorithms we present greatly improve scalability.