Reflection is a technique that enables a system to inspect or change its structure and/or behavior at runtime. It is a key enabler of many techniques for developing systems that have to function despite rapidly changing requirements and environments. A crucial issue in developing reflective systems is to ensure the correctness of their behaviors, because object-level behaviors are affected by metalevel behaviors. In this paper, we present an extended labeled transition system (LTS), which we call a metalevel LTS (MLTS), that supports data representation of another LTS for use in modeling a reflective tower. We show that two of the existing state reduction techniques for an LTS ( symmetry reduction and divergence-sensitive stutter bisimulation ) are also applicable to an MLTS. Then, we introduce two strategies for implementing an MLTS model in Promela, thereby enabling verification with the SPIN model checker. We also present case studies of applying MLTSs to two reflection applications: self-adaptation of a reconnaissance robot system, and dynamic evolution of an Internet-of-things (IoT) system. The case studies demonstrate the applicability of our approach and its scalability improvement through the state reduction techniques.

中文翻译：

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通过标记转换系统实现反射系统的可扩展模型检查

反射是一种使系统能够在运行时检查或更改其结构和/或行为的技术。它是许多技术的关键推动因素，用于开发在需求和环境快速变化的情况下仍必须正常运行的系统。开发反射系统的一个关键问题是确保其行为的正确性，因为对象级行为受到元级行为的影响。在本文中，我们提出了一个扩展的标记转换系统 (LTS)，我们称之为元级 LTS (MLTS)，它支持另一个 LTS 的数据表示，用于对反射塔进行建模。我们展示了 LTS 的两种现有状态减少技术（ 对称减少和发散敏感口吃双模拟）也适用于 MLTS。然后，我们介绍了在 Promela 中实现 MLTS 模型的两种策略，从而可以使用 SPIN 模型检查器进行验证。我们还介绍了将 MLTS 应用于两个反射应用的案例研究：侦察机器人系统的自适应和物联网 (IoT) 系统的动态演化。案例研究证明了我们的方法的适用性及其通过状态减少技术的可扩展性改进。