REFINER: Towards Formal Verification of Model Transformations

We present the Refiner tool, which offers techniques to define behavioural transformations applicable on formal models of concurrent systems, reason about semantics preservation and the preservation of safety and liveness properties of such transformations, and apply them on models. Behavioural transformations allow to change the potential behaviour of systems. This is useful for model-driven development approaches, where systems are designed and created by first developing an abstract model, and iteratively refining this model until it is concrete enough to automatically generate source code from it. Properties that hold on the initial model and should remain valid throughout the development in later models can be maintained, by which the effort of verifying those properties over and over again is avoided. The tool integrates with the existing model checking toolsets MCRL2 and CADP, resulting in a complete model checking approach for model-driven system development.