In: Proc. ACM SIFSOFT 6th Int. Symp. on the Foundations of Software Engineering, 3-5 November 1998, Lake Buena Vista, FL, Vol. 23, pages 35-45. 1998.
Abstract: Understanding the behavior of a system is crucial in being able to modify, maintain, and improve the system. A particularly difficult aspect of some system behaviors is concurrency. While there are many techniques to specify intended concurrent behavior, there are few, if any, techniques to capture and model actual behavior. Petri nets are used in this paper as models of concurrent processes. A technique is presented to discover patterns of concurrent behavior from traces of system events. The techniques is based on a probabilistic analysis of the event traces. Using metrics for the number, frequency, and regularity of event occurrences, a determination is made of the likely behavior being manifested by the system. The technique is useful in a wide variety of software engineering tasks, including architecture discovery, reengineering, user interaction modeling, and software process improvements.
Keywords: Petri nets, concurrency modeling, event traces.