An Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Detecting Distributed Predicates

Developing correct dependable distributed applications is a difficult task. The techniques developed to detect distributed predicates can be used to verify the satisfaction of specific properties (represented as predicates) in a given run of a distributed application. These techniques have several applications including the verification of the correctness of a particular implementation of a distributed system (runtime verification). Due to concurrency, the number of states to be considered in detecting a distributed predicate is exponential. This article investigates the effectiveness of using a meta-heuristic algorithm in solving the problem of detecting distributed predicates. Namely, the authors have used the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm to develop an algorithm to detect distributed predicates. The conducted experiments demonstrate that the ABC-based detection algorithm has a better performance compared with the traditional state enumeration-based detection algorithm.